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I 










THE SIOUX RUNNER 



! 


“INDIAN” STORIES 
WITH HISTORICAL BASES 
By D. LANGE 
12mo Cloth Illustrated 

ON THE TRAIL OF THE SIOUX 

THE SILVER ISLAND OF THE 
CHIPPEWA 

LOST IN THE FUR COUNTRY 
IN THE GREAT WILD NORTH 
THE LURE OF THE BLACK HILLS 
THE LURE OF THE MISSISSIPPI 
THE SILVER CACHE OF THE PAWNEE 
THE SHAWNEE’S WARNING 
THE THREAT OF SITTING BULL 
THE RAID OF THE OTTAWA 
THE MOHAWK RANGER 
THE IROQUOIS SCOUT 
THE SIOUX RUNNER 

LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., BOSTON 






' 

























. ' 













Majiota and Tubby plied their short paddles. — Page 193, 









THE 

SIOUX RUNNER 


By 

D. LANGE 


.yjtSS 


Illustrated by 
FRANK T. MERRILL 





BOSTON 

LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO. 









Copyright, 1924, 
By D. Lange 


The Sioux Runner 




< 


Printed in U. S. A. 


IRorwooD ipress 
BERWICK & SMITH CO. 
Norwood, Mass. 


/ 


NOV 19 j924 


Cl A 807889 




PREFACE 


The Sioux Runner belongs to the time 
when the great change in the life of all the 
Western Indians was beginning to be hur¬ 
ried to a climax. To many of the old-time 
hunters and warriors, this climax could not 
appear otherwise than as the final tragedy of 
their people. 

Gold had been discovered in the Rocky 
Mountains, the Pacific Coast had become a 
part of the United States, steamboats were 
running up the Missouri as far as Fort Ben¬ 
ton ; and the Indians knew that the building 
of roads and railroads would bring the end 
of the old days. 

In the inevitable progress of history, the 
old-time Indian and the vast herds of buf¬ 
faloes and other game had to be reduced, but 
there never was either necessity or justifica¬ 
tion for the brutal slaughter to which they 
were subjected. 

Fortunately, our two great rivers, the 

5 


6 


PREFACE 


Mississippi and the Missouri will never be 
tamed, although the red hunters that once 
travelled in canoes and bull-boats on their 
waters may have changed much, or even 
vanished from the river and the plains. 

The present story has for its geograph¬ 
ical setting the Missouri River and the 
country of the Sioux as it existed in 1864. 

My thanks are due to Mr. Doane Robin¬ 
son, Secretary of the South Dakota Histori¬ 
cal Society of Pierre, S. D., for much infor¬ 
mation which was not otherwise obtainable. 

I am also under much obligation to the 
members of the library staff of the Min¬ 
nesota Historical Society of St. Paul, for 
many personal courtesies and for free access 
to the library. Without this valuable li¬ 
brary, the 44 Sioux Runner ” and my other 
stories for young people could not have been 
written. 

D. Lange. 

St. Paul, Minnesota, 

September first, 1924. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 

I. 

Mahota and Tubby - 



PAGE 

11 

II. 

Mahota’s Vision - 

mm 

- 

18 

III. 

A Night With the Gray Wolves 

25 

IV. 

Waiting for Mahota 

- 

- 

37 

Y. 

Bad News - 

- 

- 

45 

YI. 

Hiram’s Question 

- 

- 

53 

VII. 

A Bold White Man - 

- 

- 

59 

VIII. 

The Feast - 

- 

- 

67 

IX. 

Old Dacotah’s Story 

- 

- 

73 

X. 

On the Long Trail - 

- 

- 

79 

XI. 

Signs of Danger 

- 

- 

88 

XII. 

Making a Stand 

- 

mm 

97 

XIII. 

Mahota’s Advice 

mm 

- 

105 

XIY. 

Mahota’s Pinto - 

- 

- 

110 

XV. 

The Voice from the Clouds 

- 

117 

XYI. 

Tubby Starts a Fight 

- 

- 

126 

XVII. 

Strange Creatures - 

- 

- 

137 

XVIII. 

Tubby Learns a Lesson 

- 

- 

145 

XIX. 

A Night of Terror - 

- 

- 

150 

XX. 

Mahota in Doubt 

- 

- 

157 

XXL 

The Decoy Bundle - 

- 

- 

164 

XXII. 

Mahota’s Strategy - 

7 

- 

m 

173 


8 

CONTENTS 




XXIII. 

The Hunting-Camp 

- 

- 

181 

XXIV. 

The Bull-Boat 

- 

mm 

188 

XXV. 

Tubby’s Exploit 

- 

- 

196 

XXVI. 

The Great Sickness 

- 

- 

203 

XXVII. 

Fort Union 

- 

- 

210 

XXVIII. 

Gifts of the White Men 

- 

218 

XXIX. 

The Abandoned Fort 

- 

- 

227 

XXX. 

An Indian Invention 

- 


233 

XXXI. 

Unexpected Visitors 

- 

- 

240 

XXXII. 

Anxious Days - 

- 

- 

248 

XXXIII. 

A Desperate Race - 

m 

• 

258 



s 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

Mahota and Tubby plied their short 

paddles (Page 193) - - Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

“ Hide right in! Old Dacotah never turned 

a stranger away ” - - - 66 

Once more Mahota signalled: “ Keep 

away! ” - - - - 102 

He soon lay within easy reach of the game 148 

“ Catch them, Mahota! Head them off, 

Hiram! ” - - - - - 202 

“We have done all we can ” 238 


9 





THE SIOUX RUNNER 


CHAPTER I 
Mahota and Tubby 

Mahota, the young Sioux scout and run¬ 
ner, was becoming very much disgusted with 
the behavior of the white men whom he had 
agreed to conduct across Dakota and Mon¬ 
tana to Fort Benton, by way of Fort Union, 
in the early summer of 1864. 

The party consisted of five men and two 
white boys, Hiram Sterling and his younger 
brother, Simon, called Tubby by the boys of 
the little unpainted district schoolhouse near 
Geneva, Kansas, because, much to his own 
regret, Tubby, when he first went to school, 
was short and chunky. 

At first little Simon resented the change 
of his name, with all the eager fierceness of a 
small boy, and he fought several pitched 
battles for the retention of his Christian 

11 


12 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


name, but when he found that he would have 
to fight every boy he met, and that, in spite 
of all his brave fighting, he would still be 
“ Tubby Sterling,” he turned philosopher 
and accepted the inevitable with good grace. 

Everybody had called him “ Tubby ” for 
several years and he had ceased to resent it. 
He was now in his fourteenth year, and 
had completely outgrown whatever tubbi¬ 
ness he might have shown when he was ten, 
being now a tall, lank boy with hard 
muscles, a face almost as brown as that of 
Mahota, and an appetite that easily matched 
that of his big brother, Hiram. 

But in spite of his changed appearance the 
nickname stuck to him. His brother and 
the men called him “ Tubby ” and his de¬ 
voted friend, Mahota, who seldom called the 
lad by name, anyway, would not have known 
who “ Simon ” was. 

“ Little big brother, I am very much 
angry,” Mahota told his young friend one 
evening. “ These white men are big fools. 
I tell them we must camp on this creek in the 
timber to-day and travel at night, when war 


MAHOTA AND TUBBY 


13 


parties of young Sioux cannot see us. 
They get mad and tell me to go to the 
white man’s bad place, and they talk loud 
and damn me and talk big cuss-words. They 
say they want to get to Fort Union and to 
Idaho quick. I tell them Fort Union will 
wait for us and Idaho has been in the same 
place since the Great Spirit made the moun¬ 
tains and the plains and it cannot run away. 
They talk some more cuss-words to me and 
say they are not afraid of Indians, my busi¬ 
ness is to show them the way and keep my 
mouth shut, and if I do not do it quick they 
will leave us and go on a fire-canoe to Fort 
Union. They are fool white men. They 
talk foolish and act foolish. 

“ There are three thousand Sioux war¬ 
riors on the plains. All the Sioux tribes are 
angry at the whites, except my own people, 
the Yanktons. The Sissetons once were 
friends of the whites, but now they are also 
angry. 

“ Last summer General Sully killed two 
Sioux and stuck their heads up on poles. 
Now the hostile Sioux laugh at those that 



14 


THE SIOUX RUXNER 


were friendly and say, ‘ The white men are 
no better than the Indians. They wish to 
kill our men and starve our women and chil¬ 
dren. They want to make a road across the 
last buffalo country. Then many white 
hunters will come and slaughter all the buf¬ 
faloes just to sell the hides. The Indians 
will all starve, and the Sioux will no longer 
be a great nation.’ 

“ That is the way many of the young 
chiefs are talking, and many of our men be¬ 
lieve what they say. 

“ They also say that the time has come 
when we must all fight the white men and 
keep them out of the buffalo country, or all 
our women and children will starve. 

“ For that reason it is now very dangerous 
for a small party of white men to travel 
through the Sioux country. Maybe these 
five men will never get to Idaho, because 
they laugh and swear when I tell them that 
there is great danger ahead of them. They 
say, ‘ Go to the bad place, Mahota. You are 
afraid and want to quit the job. You stick 
right with us, or we shall make the sun and 


MAHOTA AND TUBBY 


15 


the moon shine through you, and feed you to 
the buzzards/ ” 

Mahota was silent. It was the longest 
talk Tubby had ever heard him make. And 
the white lad saw that the young Sioux was 
deadly in earnest. Beads of perspiration 
stood on the brown skin of his forehead, and 
his youthful face, generally so happy and 
cheerful, looked troubled and almost old. 

“ Have you seen hostile Indians? ” asked 
Tubby e 

“ No, I have not seen them,” replied 
Mahota, “ but I came upon one of their 
camp-sites to-day, and to-morrow or next 
day I shall see them, because I could tell 
from many signs that they had left the camp 
only yesterday.” 

“ Mahota, can we do anything,” asked 
Hiram, “ to make the men understand that 
we are now in a dangerous country? Let 
me talk to them.” 

“ My brother,” replied Mahota sadly, 
“ you may talk to them, but they will not 
listen. I tell them that five white men can¬ 
not fight fifty Indians or a hundred, even if 


16 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


they are brave and have plenty of guns. 
But they laugh and swear and call me a 
coward. Maybe, some day I shall fight one 
of them, if he again calls me a coward. 
After I have had a fight with them, I can 
leave them. Now I cannot leave them, be¬ 
cause I gave them my word to take them to 
Idaho, and my father taught me that a Sioux 
warrior never breaks his word. 

“ But you and the little big brother should 
leave these men, or you may be killed with 
them.” 

“ How can we leave them, Mahota? ” 
asked Tubby. “We can’t travel alone 
through the Indian country and we can’t go 
back to Kansas.” 

“I do not know what you should do,” 
Mahota replied looking sad and worried. 
“ Maybe, you should go back and join the 
big emigrant train, which we left a week ago. 
Or, maybe, you should wait here for them, 
or, maybe, you should go to Fort Union on 
a fire-canoe. I do not know what you should 
do, but if you travel many more days with 
these reckless men, I fear much that some 


MAHOTA AND TUBBY 


17 


hostile Sioux will kill you, and you will never 
learn whether your two brothers are still in 
Idaho or at Fort Benton, or at some other 
fort or trading-post on the Big Muddy 
River, or whether they have gone into the 
unknown mountains. 

“ White men do strange things. They go 
into a country where there are no buffaloes 
and no deer, into the country which the 
Great Spirit has given to the bighorn sheep 
and to the white goat and to matohota, the 
stout-hearted grizzly bear. They go to 
these places to dig for mazaskazi, the shin¬ 
ing yellow metal. The Indians think white 
men are foolish to dig in the mountains, be¬ 
cause they all have good houses and plenty 
of clothes and enough food for a long time 
ahead. 

“Ido not know what you should do. But 
the stars are now bright and it is time for us 
to seek our blankets. Perhaps the Great 
Spirit will tell me what you should do while 
my eyes are closed in sleep.” 


CHAPTER II 

Mahota’s Vision 

In the morning Mahota was more cheer¬ 
ful. “ The Great Spirit has sent me a mes¬ 
sage,” he told his friends, “ while my spirit 
was away from my body. 

“You and the men must remain in camp 
to-day; no trail leads to this patch of woods, 
and deer and elk are seldom found here, so 
you will be quite safe from Sioux scouts and 
hunters. You must keep your horses in the 
brush, you must not build a fire or shoot off 
your guns. After the sun has set you may 
stake out your horses on the good grass out¬ 
side the bushes. 

“ I shall follow the trail that leads away 
from the Indian camp, which I found yes¬ 
terday. I shall learn who is the chief of the 
camp, how many warriors there are, and 
where they are going to make their next 
camp.” 


18 


MAHOTA’S VISION 


19 


When Mahota was already mounted on 
his fast horse, he briefly told this plan to the 
men, and again he was the subject of much 
abuse. Big Hubbard, the most loud¬ 
mouthed of the five, even threatened to shoot 
Mahota if he carried out the plan he had 
just outlined. 

“We can go to any place any Indian can 
go to,” he roared, interspersing his words 
with many foul oaths. But Mahota cut him 
short by riding away down the ravine. 

It was well that he did not hear the curses 
the men shouted after him. 

As for the admonitions of Mahota, they 
disregarded them all. They built a fire to 
dry their blankets, which were damp from a 
light rain of the previous night, and the 
smoke from the wet and rotten poplar wood 
rose high over the grove. Most of their 
horses they turned loose in the open outside 
the timbers, and after they had emptied a 
bottle of strong drink, Big Hubbard chal¬ 
lenged the others to a shooting-match, and 
each one fired his gun two or three times. 

Hiram and Tubby had kept away from 


20 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


the noisy men, and when they started to 
build a fire, Tubby urged Hiram to warn 
them. 

“ Why, brother,” Hiram objected, “ what 
would be the use? If they do not listen to 
Mahota, they certainly will pay no attention 
to me. I fear that Big Hubbard would hit 
me on the head for my trouble.” 

Naturally both lads watched the behavior 
of the men with great uneasiness. “ If they 
were trying to attract the attention of hostile 
Sioux warriors, they could not do much more 
than they are doing,” remarked Hiram. 

But when the men began to fire their guns, 
Hiram asked Tubby to mount his horse. 
“ Come, brother,” he urged quietly, “ we 
must leave these fellows. I think they are 
both foolish and crazed with liquor, and it 
will just be luck if they do not bring a Sioux 
war party on us before the day is over.” 

Without the men being aware of what was 
going on, the lads slipped away down the 
wooded ravine riding their saddle-horses and 
leading their own pack-horses and an extra 
saddle-horse belonging to Mahota. 


MAHOTA’S VISION 


21 


“ Hiram,” whispered Tubby, as if he were 
afraid Big Hubbard might hear it, “ Hiram, 
I am afraid Mahota will think we have stolen 
his horse and run away with it. And how 
can he find us if we don’t stay in our 
camp? ” 

“You needn’t worry, Tubby,” Hiram 
tried to assure the younger boy. “ I think 
Mahota will be glad that we saved his horse 
and blankets. I feel sure if he had known 
the character of these men he never would 
have agreed to guide them to Fort Benton. 
I think they are worthless sots from the 
river-front of St. Louis.” 

The lads tied their horses in a patch of 
timber, which ran out to the upland from 
the side of the ravine, and then sat down 
under some bushes where they could 
watch the men without being seen them¬ 
selves. 

After some time the men became quiet. 
“ I believe those fellows have lain down to 
sleep,” remarked Hiram. “ If they ever 
get to Fort Benton, I’ll eat my shirt.” 

“ Look at their horses,” Tubby pointed 


22 THE SIOUX RUNXER 

out; “ they are a quarter of a mile out on the 
prairie.” 

The camp remained quiet until near noon, 
when the lads heard again the voice of Big 
Hubbard, and very soon two mounted men 
came out of the timber and brought the 
strayed horses back to camp. 

“ They are impatient to reach Fort 
Union,” Hiram told his brother, “ because 
at that place several friends intend to join 
them for Idaho.” 

Very soon the men began to call the names 
of the boys, and Big Hubbard even came 
down the ravine swearing at the white lads 
and at Mahota, calling them thieves and 
cowards and other vile names. 

The lads were anxiously holding their 
horses. “ Tubby, if he discovers us, we must 
break away for the prairie and ride down 
along the edge of the timber,” whispered 
Hiram. 

Tubby’s horse, as is natural for horses to 
do, started to neigh, and Hiram punched 
him sharply in the ribs and whispered, 
“ Shut up, you fool critter! ” 


MAHOTA’S VISION 


23 


But Big Hubbard was making so much 
noise himself that he did not hear Tubby’s 
horse, and, yelling and cursing, he rode back 
to camp. 

After some more hallooing and firing of 
guns, the lads saw the five men ride out in 
the open and follow the general direction 
which Mahota had taken in the morning. 

“Those crazy fellows!” exclaimed Hi¬ 
ram. “ They are riding straight to their de¬ 
struction! ” 

\ 

“ I heard Big Hubbard boast last night,” 
said Tubby, “ that they are not afraid of all 
the Sioux in the country. Mahota only 
talked a lot of danger, because he expected 
to get more money out of them for taking 
them through. The same man offered to bet 
a hundred dollars that there wasn’t a Sioux 
warrior within a hundred miles of camp and 
that they wouldn’t see five Indians all the 
way to Fort Benton.” 

About two miles to the northwest, another 
small stream, fringed with timber, broke the 
treeless prairie, and the five men were head¬ 
ing for this stream. 


24 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


“ They are really going,” said Tubby, 
after the lads had watched them for a while. 
“ Shouldn’t we follow them, Hiram? ” 

“We should not!” replied Hiram deci¬ 
sively. “ They are just a bunch of foolish 
and dangerous rowdies, and I’m glad we are 
rid of them.” 

“ But I fear that Mahota will go with 
them if he meets them, and we can’t stay 
here in the woods alone.” 

“I do not think that Mahota will go with 
them,” Hiram asserted. “ Unless Mahota 
calls for us, we camp right here over night.” 

Very soon after the men had disappeared 
into the timber, the lads heard shooting. 
One, two, three guns, and then there was a 
sound as if a dozen guns were fired in close 
succession. Then again a few straggling 
shots and then once more the silence of the 
summer day. 

“ What was it, Hiram? ” asked Tubby. 
“ Did they have a fight with Mahota? ” 


CHAPTER III 

A Night With the Gray Wolyes 

Hiram considered it very improbable that 
Mahota had been concerned in the shooting 
at all. “ He is too good a scout,” Hiram 
explained, “ to expose himself to the guns of 
these reckless men.” 

“ But how could they do so much shoot¬ 
ing? ” asked Tubby. “ You know they had 
only one rifle each.” 

“ I think I can explain that easily 
enough,” Hiram replied. “ These men have 
less sense than a crowd of schoolboys. It is 
quite likely that they came upon a bunch of 
elk. If they did, I am sure they would all 
fire their rifles, and then they would draw 
their pistols and blaze away as long as they 
could see an elk run. You know, elk love 
the patches and fringes of timber that run 
out on the prairie along the streams.” 

Tubby now climbed a scrubby tree and 

25 


26 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


looked sharp in the direction of the timber, 
while at the same time both lads kept well 
under cover. 

“ I can’t see a thing,” he declared after 
some careful scouting. “ There are no elk, 
buffalo, or horses this side of the timber or to 
the west of it. I can see the prairie north 
of the timber quite distinctly, but I can’t 
make out any dark or moving object. Who¬ 
ever it was that did the shooting must still 
be in the timber.” 

“ It is strange,” admitted Hiram. “ I 
wonder if the men could have been ambushed 
by Indians.” 

“ Why can’t we go over and see? ” asked 
Tubby. “We can leave the horses here and 
scout over on foot.” 

“We could probably do it,” Hiram 
granted, “ but we would just wear ourselves 
out, and then Mahota might return in the 
meantime, and he would be worried and puz¬ 
zled if he did not find us, and he would then 
probably follow the trail of the men. I 
think, brother, we had better slip back to 
our last night’s camp, because there is no 


A NIGHT WITH WOLVES 27 

telling when Mahota will look for us 
there.” 

The afternoon wore away slowly. Tubby 
soon grew drowsy after all the excitement 
and fell asleep behind the log, where the lads 
had taken their position. 

The meadow-larks began to whistle their 
afternoon song, and the white-winged bunt¬ 
ings, which are common and striking birds 
of the Dakota prairie, seemed to have staged 
a song contest with the bobolinks on the edge 
of a near-by marsh, for both the bunting and 
the bobolink make short flights into the air 
while they are singing, and they also sing 
from a weed or rock. 

A white-tail buck came close enough to 
the camp to get the man scent, and then 
snorted and stamped about in the brush for 
some time. A coyote sneaked up against 
the wind, attracted by some scraps of meat 
left at the camp, but he vanished like a gray 
streak when suddenly Hiram rose from be¬ 
hind a log and threw a stick at him. 

It was well toward evening when Tubby 
woke up and looked around with a startled 


28 


THE SIOUX RUXNER 


expression. “ Hiram, how long did I 
sleep? ” he asked. 

“ All afternoon. But you did not miss 
anything very exciting. Let us go now and 
get something to eat. I am hungry.” 

“ So am I,” Tubby agreed, and both lads 
ate a hearty meal of dried buffalo meat, 
which Mahota had left for them. 

“ I wish Mahota would come,” said 
Tubby, when they had taken a drink at a 
spring. “ You know, Hiram, when evening 
comes, it seems kind of lonesome without 
him. He will surely come back before dark, 
won’t he, Hiram? ” 

“ I guess he will,” Hiram answered me¬ 
chanically without really thinking of what 
he said, for he was beginning to be seriously 
worried about Mahota. Supposing some of * 
those shots had been aimed at him, after all? 
Big Hubbard and his men were reckless and 
mean enough to commit almost any outrage. 
They had openly threatened Mahota, and 
Hiram considered them all to belong to that 
class of bad white men in whose eyes an In¬ 
dian has no rights, not even the right to live. 


A NIGHT WITH WOLVES 


29 


Hiram regretted very much now that he had 
not warned Mahota, as he had intended to 
do. 

The sun disappeared behind a vast extent 
of rose-colored clouds, but there was neither 
sign nor sound of Mahota. 

“ Come, Tubby,” said Hiram, “ we must 
take the horses to the creek, or they will not 
eat well during the night.” 

When the thirsty animals had drunk their 
fill, it was quite dark, and they were staked 
out in the open on the edge of the timber 
where the grass was at its best. 

The stars came out clear and twinkling, 
and the prairie and the timber seemed to be¬ 
come suddenly alive with the shrill howls of 
many coyotes, but there were also the deeper 
voices of the big gray wolves. A gentle 
breeze was blowing from the west, but the 
wolf calls came from the timber to the 
east, and many of the voices were coming 
nearer. 

“ Hiram, they are all coming this way,” 
said Tubby. “Are they going to attack 
us?” 


30 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


Tubby had heard the wolves and coyotes 
howl every night, while the lads were still 
travelling with the train of emigrants from 
Kansas, but there were so many armed men 
in camp and there was always so much noise 
and life that he was never afraid. 

Now he and Hiram were all alone in a 
narrow strip of timber. There was no other 
sound but the howling of wolves and coyotes, 
and he had a feeling that the big gray wolves 
were coming closer and closer and were go¬ 
ing to surround the camp. For the first 
time in his life Tubby was really thoroughly 
scared, with the primitive fear of the night 
and the wilderness upon him. 

“ Hiram,” he whispered, “ if you weren’t 
here, I would climb a tree and tie myself up 
for the night. I’m just plumb scared to 
death. Listen, Hiram! They are all around 
us. I can hear them run in the brush! ” 

The older brother, although he felt very 
uncanny himself, tried to quiet the fear of 
the boy. 

“ I never heard,” he explained, “ of wolves 
really attacking people in summer. There 


A NIGHT WITH WOLVES 


31 


are plenty stories of men being chased up a 
tree, but I think most of these men were 
chased up a tree, not by the wolves, but by 
their own fear. 

“ I have no doubt, if we climbed a tree, 
the wolves would soon come and surround us, 
because it is their natural instinct to pursue 
any creature that runs away from them. 

“ The brutes are attracted by the smell of 
our camp, and they may really be hungry, 
because the Indians and General Sully’s 
soldiers last summer have probably scared 
most of the game, especially the buffalo, out 
of this part of the country. 

“ I am afraid the beasts might pull down 
one of our horses, or scare them all away, and 
then we should be in a bad fix. 

“ Take our blankets, our guns and meat, 
Tubby, and let us move to the edge of the 
timber near our horses. I shall gather an 
armful of big sticks and clubs. If our horses 
get scared, they will pull up their picket-pins 
and run off, and we shall never see them 
again.” 

The horses, as Hiram had surmised, were 


32 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


getting alarmed. All four were standing 
up alert, snorting and pulling at the picket- 
ropes. But when the lads spoke to them 
their fears were at once calmed and they 
fell to feeding again. 

For some time the wolves snarled and 
rushed about on the camp ground. Then 
they grew bolder and came near the edge of 
the timber. 

“ Tubby, you watch to the left,” Hiram 
said. “ I shall watch to the right. If a horse 
pulls up his picket-pin, run and catch the 
rope before he gets away.” 

A big animal came slowly out of the brush 
on Tubby’s side, not over ten yards away. As 
Tubby rushed toward him the beast turned 
back for cover, but not before the lad had 
hurled a stout club at him and shouted, 
“ Get out of there! ” 

Tubby laughed as the brute rushed back 
into the brush. “I hit him square in the 
ribs, Hiram,” he called. “ He won’t come 
back. I am not scared any more now.” 

Perhaps that particular wolf did not come 
back, but others came out and tried to sneak 


A NIGHT WITH WOLVES 


33 


up on the frightened horses, who snorted 
with heads raised high every time one of 
the hungry gray beasts appeared in the 
open. 

After a while the wolves gave up trying 
to approach the horses from the timber and 
the lads thought they were rid of them for 
the night, but they soon learned that they 
had underrated the cunning and persistence 
of the wily gray hunters. 

It seemed as if they had held a council, 
and now they tried to approach the horses 
down the wind over the open prairie. The 
horses again became much excited, for now 
they were getting strong the scent of the 
natural enemies of all creatures that eat 
grass, and the boys were compelled to stand 
guard over their horses and walk around 
them all night, in order to calm their fears 
and keep them from constant attempts to 
break away. 

“ I wish I could take a shot at them,” 
Tubby said. “ I have never had a chance 
to hunt wolves, and now they are right here. 
I know I could get one, but you say I 


34 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


mustn’t shoot at them. Chasing wolves all 
night with a club is sure hard luck. Let me 
blaze away at one, just once.” 

“ No, you can’t shoot at them,” Hiram 
insisted laughing. “ Hunt them with a club 
all you want. A gunshot can be heard so 
far on a still night that I fear it would bring 
some Indians on us at the first dawn of 
day.” 

“ Ah, the Indians are asleep now. They 
don’t sit up all night. Let me try just 
once,” persisted Tubby. 

“ Yes, any Indians that may be in this re¬ 
gion are probably asleep now,” Hiram ad¬ 
mitted. “ But we can’t take a chance on it. 
No shooting, not even once! Hunt them 
with a club, brother, all you want.” 

“ I’m tired of hunting them with a club,” 
Tubby replied somewhat peeved. “ That’s 
no fun.” 

“ We aren’t doing it for fun,” Hiram an¬ 
swered, teasing the impatient Tubby. “ Lie 
down and sleep, if you are tired of wolf¬ 
hunting.” 

“ How can a fellow sleep with wolves 


A NIGHT WITH WOLVES 


35 


sneaking and howling all around him? ” re¬ 
torted Tubby. “ Do you think I want them 
to carry me off? ” 

“ Well,” Hiram continued to tease him, 
“ then you could be a real brave Indian and 
kill one with your hunting-knife. That 
would make a fine story to brag to the girls 
about.” 

“ Ah, come off, Hiram,” Tubby replied, 
still angry. “ I never bragged to any girls, 
but you know you used to do a lot of it back 
in Kansas. I may never see any girls 
again.” 

“ You probably won’t if you start shoot¬ 
ing at wolves here.” 

“ Hiram, I would like to lick you,” Tubby 
came back, somewhat over his anger, “ if you 
only weren’t so big. Maybe next year I 
can do it.” 

All night the wolves prowled around the 
horses; at times they approached quite close, 
at other times they sat and howled at a dis¬ 
tance. 

When the stars began to pale in the east, 
the lads took their horses back in the timber, 


36 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


and at dawn of day the wolves became silent 
and disappeared. 

The wind had died down and the dew had 
fallen on trees, grass and flowers. When 
the sun rose and blackbirds, meadow-larks, 
and buntings sang on the prairie, while 
orioles with their loud cheerful calls, and 
vireos and warblers with smaller voices made 
the timber seem alive with happiness, the 
camp of the lads on the little wooded stream 
seemed the most peaceful place in the whole 
world. 

But Hiram and Tubby were not in a mood 
to get much joy out of the bird music and 
the sparkling dew. They had not slept a 
wink all night, and there was still no sign nor 
sound of Mahota. 


CHAPTER IV 
Waiting for Mahota 

After the lads had eaten a breakfast of 
dried buffalo meat and spring-water, Hiram 
rolled up in his blanket for a little sleep. 

Tubby said he wasn’t sleepy and would 
watch for a while. But when he sat down 
behind a log, he also began to feel sleepy, so 
he arose and walked about, for Hiram had 
impressed it upon him that on no account 
must he fall asleep. 

For about an hour he walked slowly back 
and forth. He listened for sounds in the 
timber, but heard only the music of song¬ 
birds and the tapping and drumming of 
woodpeckers. Several times he carefully 
scanned the prairie south as well as east and 
west. He saw nothing but the funny little 
brown gophers and a fat wobbling badger in 
front of his hole. A few rods from the tim¬ 
ber, a marsh-hawk was sitting on a rock and 

37 


38 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


uttering his sharp scream, and several black 
vultures soared westward high overhead. 

“ I believe the men were right,” thought 

Tubbv. “ There isn’t an Indian in this 
«/ 

country.” 

But when the sun was about two hours 
high, Tubby, looking toward the timber, 
where the men had disappeared from view 
the day before, saw something that made 
him feel as if his heart were going to jump 
up his throat, and for a moment he thought 
his eyes must be deceiving him. 

Ten or twelve Indians came riding out of 
the timber and headed straight for the camp 
of the lads. 

For a few moments the boy gazed at the 
sight to make sure that he was not mistaken, 
then he rushed over to his brother. 

“Sioux, Hiram! Be quick!” he whis¬ 
pered, as if the Indians were already within 
hearing. “ They are coming straight for 
our camp! ” 

Hiram jumped up and reached for his 
gun, thinking the Indians were already in 
the timber near their camp. For a short 


WAITING FOR MAHOTA 39 

time both lads watched the approaching 
Sioux with almost breathless suspense. 

“ Let us mount and get away,” whispered 
Tubby. 

“ No, wait a bit,” answered Hiram. “ I 
want to make out whether they are a hunt¬ 
ing party or a war party.” 

“ You aren’t going to fight them, 
Hiram? ” Tubby protested. “ You know 
Mahota told us not to start any shooting 
under any circumstances.” 

Now the Indians stopped about a mile 
away and consulted. The boys could see 
one man pointing in the direction of Hiram’s 
and Tubby’s hiding-place, but another man 
pointed farther to the west; and when they 
all started again, they turned more westward 
to the open prairie, and the white lads saw 
that they were in no danger of being dis¬ 
covered. 

Hiram was no longer sleepy, but he urged 
Tubby to lie down and sleep. “ You have 
been awake all night,” he urged; “you had 
better roll up in your blankets for a while.” 

“ No, sir. Not I! ” objected Tubby. “ I 


40 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


couldn’t sleep a wink. There may be some 
more of them coming. Anyway, I feel now 
as if the woods were full of Indians all 
around us. You can lie down, Hiram. I 
am going to watch.” 

Hiram tried to convince Tubby that the 
Indians they could still see were not a war 
party, but were either a hunting party or 
perhaps scouts from a larger camp. But 
Tubby could not be persuaded to lie down. 

“ I am going to watch,” Tubby insisted. 
“ There may be some more of them coming. 
But I wish Mahota were here. I am afraid 
he has been killed. What can we do, Hiram, 
if he doesn’t come back? ” 

“ He will come back,” Hiram tried to as¬ 
sure him. “ But if he has not returned to¬ 
morrow morning, we shall walk over to the 
woods, where the shooting took place yes¬ 
terday and try to find out what happened 
there.” 

The day wore away slowly. The sun rose 
on the blue sky, and light summer clouds 
floated slowly eastward. The birds became 
silent as the day grew hot, grasshoppers 


WAITING FOR MAHOTA 


41 


rasped their wings, and the wild bees, not 
honey-bees, darted from flower to flower and 
fairly burrowed in the pollen of the wild 
white poppy and in the odd pendant flowers 
of the yucca, better known to the plainsmen 
as Spanish bayonets; and numerous little 
green bees also filled their tiny pollen- 
baskets in the pale yellow flowers of the wild 
cactus, which is the dreaded prickly pear of 
the plains. 

The sun passed the noon line and de¬ 
scended toward the western horizon. Once 
more meadow-larks, buntings, and black¬ 
birds struck up in concert on the prairie, 
while the notes of orioles and vireos again 
rang in the timber. 

On the edge of the timber where the after¬ 
noon sun had beat against the foliage, scold¬ 
ing kingbirds and a pair of large yellow¬ 
breasted flycatchers, now known as Arkan¬ 
sas kingbirds, pursued their insect prey on 
the wing after the manner of all flycatchers. 

As the sun sank low, the lads saw several 
prairie hens lead their brood of chicks about 
in search of insects; and many gophers and 


42 


THE SIOUX RUNXER 


jack-rabbits and a few badgers became active 
on the prairie. 

Once more the sun sank behind a mass of 
red clouds, but of Mahota there was no sign. 

The little marsh-wrens, singers of the 
night, became noisy with their sibilant, peb¬ 
bly song, and then there came again the 
howling and yapping of the coyotes and the 
dreaded call of the gray wolves. 

“ Hiram, I am afraid Mahota is not com¬ 
ing back,” Tubby unburdened his mind, as 
the lads staked their horses out on the prairie 
a second time. 

“ He will come, all right, brother,” Hiram 
asserted stoutly. But his heart began to 
fail him and grave doubts beset him. Per¬ 
haps Mahota lay dead in the timber yonder. 

The lads prepared to spend another sleep¬ 
less night guarding their horses, but, much 
to their relief, the wolves did not again come 
after the horses. To judge from their calls, 
they were moving toward the timber from 
which the Indians had emerged in the morn¬ 
ing. 

But now came the call of a lone coyote 


WAITING FOR MAHOTA 


43 


quite close by. “ Hoo-oo-oo, yap—yap— 
yap.” It was clearly the call of a coyote, 
but still a little different. The notes were 
repeated with more than the usual regu¬ 
larity. And again came that strange call. 

“Listen, Hiram!” Tubby called out, 
“ listen! That coyote is up in a tree! ” 

And then Mahota rode out in the open and 
swung lithely out of the saddle. 

Tubby rushed up and threw his arms 
around him. “ Thank God! ” he cried. 
“ Thank God, Mahota, you are safe. I was 
afraid you had been killed. We heard so 
much shooting in the timber.” 

“ My friends,” Mahota asked, “ where are 
the men and their horses? ” 

“ They followed on your trail in the after¬ 
noon,” Hiram related. “ We could not hold 
them back, and they tried to make us go 
along, but we had left them and concealed 
ourselves and our horses in the timber, so 
they could not find us.” 

Then Tubby told about the shooting they 
had heard in the timber two miles away and 
about the Indians they had seen. Mahota 


44 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


looked at Tubby as if the news which the 
white boy had told him were scarcely be¬ 
lievable, and his youthful face appeared seri¬ 
ous and worried. 

“ My brother, I believe you have spoken 
the truth. Your tongue is not forked, but 
the news you told me is very bad. I have 
not struck the trail of the white men and I 
have not heard their voices since I left you 
two sleeps ago. 

“ To-morrow, after the sun has risen, we 
must go and follow their trail.” 

Mahota was tired and hungry, and was 
not disposed to talk. He had taken buffalo 
meat for only one day, and had not found a 
good place to sleep. 

“ I lay down,” he told his friends, “ with 
the rope of my pony tied to my wrist, and I 
was awake many times when the pony 
scented the sneaking coyotes and the big 
gray wolves. And I heard no good news, 
but much bad news.” 


CHAPTER V 

Bad News 

Some time before daylight Mahota 
brought all the horses into the timber, and 
as soon as it was light enough to see, he be¬ 
gan to put meat, goods, and other things on 
the pack-horses. 

“ Are we not going to eat any breakfast? ” 
asked Tubby when he awoke and saw that 
Hiram and Mahota were ready to move. 

“We shall travel some miles before we 
eat,” Mahota replied. “ When we are 
hungry, we shall stop and eat.” 

Tubby had expected that Mahota would 
follow the trail of the men across the prairie, 
but he led the way in the fringe of timber 
up the Missouri, taking care to keep under 
cover as much as possible. 

When, a few miles up the river, they came 
to a ravine, through which a small creek en¬ 
tered the big river, Mahota dismounted and 
let the horses drink. 


45 


46 


THE SIOUX KUXNER 


“ You must now lie still in this place,” he 
said, “ while I walk up the little creek to the 
place where you heard the shooting.” 

Tubby pleaded with Mahota to let him go 
along, but Mahota would not permit it. 
“You must stay with your brother and 
watch the horses,” he decided. “ I shall not 
be gone very long.” 

After about an hour the young Sioux re¬ 
turned, and he looked even more gloomy 
than he did when Tubby told him what had 
happened in his absence on the preceding 
day. 

“ It was not hard to find the place,” he re¬ 
ported. “ I saw the black vultures on the 
trees and some of them sailing high in the 
air. 

“The men are all dead and their horses 
are gone, all but one, which was killed. I 
knew that the men would never get to Fort 
Benton. They were bad white men and 
would not listen to the things I told them.” 
Then he sat in silence for a long time, as if 
absorbed in deep thought. 

It was only when Hiram began to unpack 


BAD NEWS 47 

some meat for breakfast and asked if he 
might build a small fire to make tea that 
Mahota seemed to remember the presence of 
his companions. 

“Yes, we may build a small fire of dry 
sticks,” he replied. “ I have seen no signs 
of danger, and we should eat a good meal, 
because I can see that the faces of my white 
friends look thin and hungry. So let us eat 
meat and also some of the soldiers’ bread 
which you have brought with you, for it 
tastes good with the meat of the buffalo.” 

Tubby and Hiram were both glad to hear 
that they were going to have a real meal; it 
had been difficult for them to get used to an 
all-meat diet. Tubby said he had to eat 
three pounds a day and then he was still 
hungry. 

Both white lads had felt starved ever since 
they had left the emigrants about ten days 
before; and a meal of pemmican, hardtack, 
and sweet tea seemed like a real feast to 
them. Fortunately the lads had also brought 
a small bag of brown sugar. In those days 
there was no white granulated sugar on the 


48 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


market. White sugar came in hard masses 
in barrels, and the grocer kept a hatchet in 
the barrel to chop out the amounts required 
for his customers. All granulated sugar 
was brown. 

When the meal was over, Mahota sat 
down under a big cottonwood-tree and said 
they must hold a council. 

“ My brothers,” he continued, “ we are 
now alone on the Big Muddy River in the 
country of the Sioux. 

“ If the men had been wise and listened 
to me, I could have taken you all to Fort 
Benton. 

“ Eight men with plenty of guns and am¬ 
munition need not be afraid of small war 
parties, and by careful scouting we could 
have kept away from the large Sioux camps. 

“ But now the men are gone, and I do not 
know whether I can take you across the 
Sioux country. It is a long way to Fort 
Benton, and three men are in great danger 
of attack by every small war party and every 
band of outlaws, like the bands of Inkpa- 
doota.” 


BAB NEWS 49 

“ How far is it to Fort Benton? ” asked 
Hiram. 

“It is a long way,” Mahota replied 
gloomily. “ A lone runner could go there in 
half a moon. We might have to travel two 
moons. It is seven hundred miles, as white 
men measure a trail.” 

“ Mahota, we can easily ride fifty miles a 
day,” Tubby asserted. “ All three of us 
have good horses.” 

“ Brother, you talk foolish like a white 
boy,” the young Sioux replied, somewhat 
irritated. “ Our ponies cannot go half that 
far every day. If we travel too fast their 
feet will get sore, and they will get thin and 
may die. 

“We have to stop and hunt meat on some 
days, and there will be days of bad weather, 
when we cannot travel at all. You do not 
understand what it means to travel so far.” 

“We don’t care when we get there, Ma¬ 
hota,” Hiram spoke up. “ Do not pay any 
attention to Tubby’s talk. We shall travel 
and camp just as you tell us, if you are will¬ 
ing to take us through, although we cannot 


50 THE SIOUX RUNXER 

pay you as much as the men would have paid 
you” 

4 4 My brother, I have not yet told you the 
bad news,” Mahota spoke seriously. 44 The 
whole Sioux nation may be at war against 
the whites this summer. All the news I 
learned is bad. 

44 General Sully is coming up the river 
from Sioux City with many soldiers and 
three big fire-canoes. All the Sioux tribes 
are much excited, and all the young men 
want to make war against him.” 

Mahota was silent for a while and looked 
down the big river, as if he expected Sully’s 
boats to be coming around the next bend. 
Then he continued: 44 Two summers ago, 
only the Santees under Little Crow and Ink- 
padoota went on the war-path and killed 
many white people in Minnesota, and over 
thirty warriors were hanged at a place called 
Mankato. 

44 Last summer General Sully came up the 
river and General Sibley marched his 
soldiers from Minnesota to the Missouri 
River. A battle started by accident, and 


BAD NEWS 


51 


many old Sisseton warriors who were friends 
of General Sibley were killed by the soldiers. 
Now General Sully is coming again, and the 
war chiefs and the young men say that all 
the Sioux tribes must fight, because the white 
men are going to make a road through the 
Sioux country from Fort Laramie to the 
Shining Mountains. If that is done, then 
many white men will come into our country, 
and they will kill all the buffalo, and then our 
people will starve. 

“ Now nearly all the tribes are thinking 
and talking of war. The Tetons, the Yank- 
tonais and the Ogallalas, as well as the San- 
tees and Sissetons. Only my tribe, the 
Yanktons, are against war. 

“You see now, my brother, that I have 
told you the truth. It is very dangerous for 
white men to travel through the Sioux 
country. I do not know if I can take you 
to Fort Benton. Any war party of young 
men, or any party of Sioux hunters may kill 
us. 

“ Now, my brothers, I have spoken. It 
may be that you should go back to your own 


52 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


people. Or it may be that you should wait 
for the soldiers and travel on the fire-canoes. 
The Sioux are afraid of the fire-canoes, be¬ 
cause they carry big guns that can shoot 
many bullets at the same time.” 


CHAPTER VI 

Hiram’s Question 

Mahota did not have to wait long for 
Hiram’s answer. 

“ My brother,” Hiram began, “ I believe 
that all your words are true. But Tubby and 
I cannot go back to our own people, because 
we have none of our own people left in Kan¬ 
sas. 

“ Our father and mother died of the 
cholera, and our two brothers, Zach and 
Allen, as you know, have gone to the gold¬ 
fields of Idaho, and it is now more than a 
year since we received a letter saying that 
they had done well and that they were com¬ 
ing home by the way of Fort Benton. 
Since then we have not heard a word from 
them, and none of the Kansas men who were 
with them have come home or sent a word 
of news. 

“ Tubby and I have no farm and no home. 

If we go back to Kansas we shall have to 

53 


54 


THE SIOUX KUXNER 


% 


work for strangers; and white men are not 
always kind to boys who have no father. 
Tubby and I have talked it all over. If we 
do not find our brothers, we shall go to Idaho 
or perhaps to California or Oregon. 

“ If President Lincoln still needs soldiers, 
when Tubby is old enough we shall both en¬ 
list. Many men thought the great war 
would be over when they heard of the battle 
of Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg, but 
when we left Kansas in May, Grant and Lee 
and Sherman were getting ready for more 
big battles, and nobody could tell when peace 
might come. Now there is war in Virginia, 
in Georgia, and here on the Missouri.” 

Hiram felt as gloomy about the ending of 
the Civil War as Mahota at the prospect of 
peace for his own people. 

The foolish and criminal acts of a few 
young men of Little Crow’s band of Santee 
Sioux in Minnesota in August, 1862, had 
been as fateful to all the Sioux tribes as the 
firing upon Fort Sumter for the whole 
American nation. It brought upon the 
Sioux nation the greatest misfortune in its 


HIRAM’S QUESTION 55 

history. They had now lost all their great 
hunting-grounds, and fertile lands in Min¬ 
nesota. 

Some three hundred warriors guilty of 
murders and other outrages were sentenced 
to death by the Military Court convened by 
General Sibley. But President Lincoln 
ordered all the records sent to him. Al¬ 
though the cares and burdens of a great Civil 
War weighed heavily upon him, the great 
man of justice and mercy, who waged one of 
the greatest civil wars in history without 
prejudice, hatred, or bitterness, went person¬ 
ally through the whole long record of the 
Military Court and in his own handwriting 
ordered that only thirty-eight of the con¬ 
demned Sioux should be executed. The 
sentence of the others he commuted, and he 
ordered them held till further orders. 

The writer does not know of any expres¬ 
sion of Lincoln on the trouble between the 
whites and the Sioux, but Lincoln felt 
rightly that the Sioux had suffered much and 
great injustice. A terrible punishment had 
already fallen upon them, upon guilty and 


56 


THE SIOUX RUXNER 


innocent alike. They had been driven out 
of Minnesota and Congress had cancelled all 
treaties with them. The inaccessible regions 
of the Bad Lands and the wild country west 
of the Missouri were now the only safe homes 
for their women and children, and even these 
wild regions were not destined to be a secure 
retreat for them many years longer. 

“We can’t travel with the soldiers,” 

Hiram decided after both Mahota and the 

white lads had sat in silence some time. 

“ You know that the Indian warriors will be 

watching the soldiers on all sides. After a 

few months the soldiers have to go back into 

winter quarters at Sioux City and Fort 

Sullv. 

«/ 

“ When that time comes, we would have 
to go with them into winter quarters, because 
the Sioux would certainly capture us or kill 
us if we tried to leave the soldiers. 

“ More than that, it would then be too late 
to make the long journey to Fort Benton, 
and we should have to spend the winter in 
the heart of the Indian country.” 

“ My brother has spoken the truth,” 


57 


HIRAM’S QUESTION 

Mahota replied. “ We must go forward 
now on the long journey to Fort Benton, 
or you and the little big brother must go back 
to Kansas, and I must go and enlist as scout 
for the Great Father in Washington. 

“ Many Sissetons and Yanktons serve him 
as scouts, and many Sioux have always been 
friends of the white men and do not want 
war. Little Paul and John Otherday saved 
many white people in Minnesota, and there 
is now a long line of scout camps between 
Fort Abercrombie on the Red River and the 
Iowa country.” 

“ We shall not go back to Kansas,” Hiram 
replied somewhat impatiently. “ If you 
will not lead us to Fort Benton, Tubby and 
I shall wait for the fire-canoes and try to en¬ 
list with General Sully. And if the general 
will not take us both as soldiers, we shall hire 
out to the quartermaster as teamsters. I 
know that Tubby can drive a mule-team, al¬ 
though he is only fourteen years old.” 

Mahota was silent for a moment. “ My 
brother,” he replied then in a firm, low voice, 
“ I will do my best to take you and the little 


58 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


big brother to Fort Benton. But it is a long 
and dangerous trail. We may be captured 
or killed or may drown in a river.” 

“ We shall follow you and stand by you 
in all danger,” Hiram promised, as he 
earnestly grasped Mahota’s hand. 

“ And now, Mahota, do you know where 
we are and what day of the month this is? ” 

“ We are on the west side of the Missouri 
River,” replied the Sioux, “ about two days’ 
journey below Fort Pierre. 

“ This is the moon of ripe strawberries, the 
month of June of the white people. 

“ General Sully and the fire-canoes left 
Sioux City on the fourth day of this moon, 
and if they have had no bad luck, the soldiers 
and the fire-canoes should soon pass the big 
trading-post, Fort Pierre, and arrive at Fort 
Sully, built last fall in 1863, by the soldiers 
on the east side, a few miles above Fort 
Pierre. Fort Pierre, you must remember, is 
on the west side of the river, but the soldiers 
are marching on the east side of the river. 
Now I have told you everything I learned 
while I was away scouting.” 


CHAPTER VII 
A Bold White Man 

Mahota and the white lads had almost 
lost count of the days, but by going over the 
time since they and the live men left the im¬ 
migrant train, they figured out that it was 
now about the fifteenth day of June. 

“ My brother,” said Mahota after they had 
figured out the date as nearly as possible, 
“ I must tell you that it will be a hard job to 
find your brothers Zach and Allen who went 
to Idaho. They will not wait for us at Fort 
Benton, because we have not sent them word 
that we are coming. 

“ They may now be travelling down the 
Missouri River, and may pass us unseen, and 
when we reach Fort Benton, they may be 
back in Kansas.” 

“ Can’t we watch the river and see that 
they don’t pass us? ” suggested Tubby. 

“ Little brother,” replied Mahota, “ you 

talk like a foolish white boy who does not 

59 


60 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


know the Missouri River and the great 
plains through which it runs. 

“ The river is very crooked and makes 
many bends. It is also very wide and makes 
many islands in its bed; even if we could 
travel close to the river and follow every 
bend, we could not see through the timber on 
the islands, and then we should not reach 
Fort Benton before the winter. 

“ But it will not always be safe to travel 
near the river, because hostile Indians may 
be camping in the timber near the water. 

“ If your brothers Zach and Allen are not 
fool white men, they will travel much at 
night and they will make no noise. But 
most white men are not wise in the Indian 
country,” Mahota continued. “ White men 
who are wise will not travel in a small boat 
on the Missouri River this summer. 

“ Our wise men and our wise chiefs do not 
wish to make war against the white men, but 
many of our young men are foolish. They 
want to make scalps as all our men did before 
the missionaries came to our people and 
taught us that peace is better than war. 


A BOLD WHITE MAN 


61 


“ These foolish young men want to be big 
warriors, and I fear that they will rob and 
kill small parties of white men, whenever 
they have a chance to do so. Now I have 
spoken.” 

“ Mahota,” Tubby spoke as if he had 
thought of a good plan, “ why couldn’t we 
go and ask at the scouting-posts if the scouts 
had seen Zach and Allen.” 

Mahota looked almost angry at Tubby’s 
question. 

“ My little brother,” he replied, “ you talk 
like a white boy who does not know the 
country of the Sioux. The camps of the 
friendly scouts are far east of the Big 
Muddy River, on the big salty lake, Minne- 
waukon (called the Devil’s Lake by white 
men), and along the Jim River to the Iowa 
country. 

“ These scouts do not watch the Missouri 
River. They have been told to keep small 
war parties of hostile Sioux from making 
raids into the white men’s country in Min¬ 
nesota. 

“ Many brave Sioux and half-breeds are 


62 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


among the scouts—Joseph Brown and Sol¬ 
omon Twostars, and many others, and our 
foolish young men are afraid of them. The 
scouts ride fast and fight hard and shoot 
straight. But they do not scout on the Mis¬ 
souri River except south of us from the Big 
Sioux River westward to the Jim River and 
then to the Missouri at the mouth of Crow 
Creek. It will be an accident if we meet any 
of them. But we shall ask about your 
brothers of some white men whom we may 
still find living on the river, and we shall stop 
at Fort Union and talk to the white traders. 
Fort Union is a big trading-post near the 
mouth of the Yellowstone. All the fire- 
canoes stop at Fort Union and so do all men 
who go down the Missouri in small boats. 

“ My brothers, we have had plenty of talk. 
Now we put the saddles on our horses and 
travel.” 

In a short time they were once more on 
the long trail. Mahota led the way. “ We 
ride over the high land,” he said; “ the land 
near the river is too muddy for the horses.” 

All day long the three rode in a northerly 


A BOLD WHITE MAN 


63 


direction. Sometimes the river was in sight, 
at other times they cut across the prairie and 
strips of timber and big patches of wild roses 
that fringed small streams. 

There was very little talk, for each was 
busy with his own thoughts; and Mahota an¬ 
swered all Tubby’s questions very briefly. 
Whenever they were about to leave a fringe 
of timber, the young Sioux scanned the 
prairie ahead of them before he rode out in 
the open, but they did not see a human being 
all day long. 

Small herds of antelopes gazed at them 
from a safe distance, and once six or seven 
elk sprang up close to them as they entered 
a fringe of cottonwoods and bushes of the 
pale-leaved buffalo-berry. 

Tubby instinctively raised his gun, but 
Mahota spoke firmly: “No shooting, 
brother. We cannot stop to take the meat, 
and we kill no game which we cannot use.” 

When it grew late in the afternoon Tubby 
began to feel very hungry, but Mahota 
showed no inclination to camp. 

A wall of dark clouds rose in the west, and 


64 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


from time to time streaks of lightning shot 
across the dark background, but overhead 
the sky was still blue. 

“We must ride faster,” Mahota urged. 
“ The Sioux took our tepees when they 
killed the men, and to-night it will be bad to 
camp without shelter. The storm is coming 
up fast with a big rain. I fear that the 
storm will bring hailstones, because the 
clouds look gray and streaked.” 

Mahota now turned into the timber to¬ 
ward the river. By this time the sky was 
overcast and the thunder rumbled overhead, 
and it seemed to be suddenly growing dark. 

“ Listen, Hiram,” Tubby spoke anx¬ 
iously. “ I hear a big waterfall ahead of us.” 

“ No, brother,” Mahota explained more 
quickly than was his habit, “ there is no fall 
in the river. It is the storm roaring in the 
tall cottonwoods ahead of us.” 

Suddenly they came upon a long pile of 
cordwood, stacked up close to the river. 

“ Let us stop behind this woodpile,” sug¬ 
gested Tubby. “ I am afraid to ride in the 
timber during the storm.” 


A BOLD WHITE MAN 


65 


“ No, brother! ” Mahota urged. “ Come 
along! We cannot stop here. It may rain 
all night.” 

A few minutes later they halted before a 
stockade of logs set into the ground and 
Mahota knocked at the heavy closed gate. 

His knock was answered at once by the 
savage barking of several big dogs, and very 
soon the gate opened slightly. A grizzled 
old man stood in the opening. He was 
dressed like an Indian in hunting-shirt, 
leggins, and moccasins, and with his left 
hand he held a rifle, but by a flash of 
lightning the lads saw that he was a white 
man. 

“ My father,” Mahota said in Sioux, as 
soon as the old man had quieted the savage 
dogs, “ we have lost our tepee and come to 
your fort for shelter from the storm.” 

“ Ride right in, ride in! ” the old man re¬ 
sponded heartily in Sioux. “ Old Dacotah 
never turned a stranger away from his fort. 
Come right in, lads! It’s going to rain as it 
did in the days of old man Noah. 

“ Tie your horses in the stable. There is 


66 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


plenty of hay in the shed, and the poor beasts 
will enjoy a meal and a dry bed. 

“ I brought my gun, because I have been 
expecting a band of Inkpadoota’s young 
devils to call for my scalp; and I had made 
up my mind that some of them were going 
with me to the Happy Hunting-Grounds.” 



“Ride right in! Old Dacotaii never turned a stranger away.” 

•— rage 65. 













CHAPTER VIII 

The Feast 

The lads had reached shelter just in the 
nick of time. No sooner had they unsaddled 
their horses, put the saddles and other things 
in a shed, and tied their horses to a manger 
of cottonwood poles than the storm broke. 

The branches of a large spreading box- 
elder tree whipped about like the small poll- 
willows of the river bottom, and for a minute 
it looked as if the thatched roofs of the old 
man’s sheds were going to follow the storm 
in its mad race down the Missouri. 

The gentle straight-down rains of the At¬ 
lantic and Pacific coast are scarcely known 
on the Missouri. The clouds generally come 
up with a violent wind and pour down the 
rain in torrents. 

The old man had been right. It seemed 
as if the very flood-gates of heaven had been 

opened. The rain came down not merely 

67 


68 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


in torrents, but in great sheets and splashes 
mingled with hailstones as large as walnuts. 

Within a short time it grew dark, with 
that peculiar gray murkiness which makes 
one feel as if sun and stars had gone out for 
good, and the earth were about to be sub¬ 
merged by another flood. 

The lads filled the manger of the horses 
with fresh hay, and the animals that had but 
recently drunk their fill at the crossing of a 
small stream began to crunch their food with 
that dumb expression of contentment to 
which no lover of horses can listen without 
deeply-felt pleasure. 

“ Now, men,” called Hiram, “ run for the 
house! ” The old man had preceded them 
and had already lit a candle in the spacious 
one-room log cabin, which had been his home 
for years. 

“ It’s a grand old storm,” he remarked. 
“ I always enjoy a real Missouri River 
storm. None of your gentle Eastern rains 
for me. The clouds in this country are as 
mad as the big old Muddy River himself.” 

The lads seated themselves on low hand- 


THE FEAST 69 

made benches, while their host started a fire 
in the old rusty cook-stove. 

The rain was still coming down in such 
torrents, while the hailstones beat on the 
rough board roof of the cabin with the noise 
of a hundred drums, that the words of the 
host were all but drowned. 

The cabin had only two small windows to¬ 
ward the inside of the fort. Hiram opened 
the door to look out. “ It is pitch-dark,” he 
said, turning to their host. “We were cer¬ 
tainly in luck to reach your fort just in 
time.” 

“ That you were, lads,” assented the old 
man, while a friendly smile lit up his 
wrinkled face. “ But now, lads, we shall 
have a feast. I have not had any friendly 
visitors for a month, and I haven’t seen a 
white man for two months, not since the 
four Idaho miners passed by, soon after the 
ice went out of the river. 

“ Yes, lads, we’ll make a feast, a real white 
man’s feast,” Old Dacotah repeated. “ I 
boiled the last mess of my potatoes this 
morning. What do you say to fried pota- 


70 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


toes and bacon? I have been keeping that 
bacon in my little ice-house for some such 
gala day, as they say in Kansas City. I 
tell you, lads, those gents in Kansas City 
with the tall silk hats and the big neckties 
have nothing on Old Dacotah when it comes 
to grub. My bacon and pork is always 
sweet, if I have any at all. None of the 
rank and spoiled stuff, which the Govern¬ 
ment so often sends up for the soldiers along 
the river.” 

Soon the pans sizzled, and the smell of 
frying bacon and potatoes filled the cabin. 
The mouths of the white boys began to 
water, for they had lived almost entirely on 
dried buffalo meat since they had left the 
emigrants, and they had not even seen a 
potato since they left their home town in 
Kansas. 

“ Mahota,” asked Tubby, “ why don’t the 
Indians raise corn and potatoes? ” 

“ Some Indians do,” Mahota replied. 
“ The Mandans raise much corn and some 
potatoes, and so do the Rees and the Gros 
Ventres. These tribes live in the same place 


THE FEAST 


71 


the year around and can make fields. Most 
of the Sioux do not raise much corn, because 
they move about so much to hunt the buffalo. 

“ But I must tell you that my own people, 
the Yanktons, have planted this year at the 
Yankton Agency four hundred acres of 
corn. I saw it, when I went on my scouting 
trip, before Big Hubbard and his men were 
killed. It looked very fine, and I hope that 
no big rain or hail will injure it.” 

By this time the meal was ready. Hot 
corn bread with maple syrup, bacon, fried 
potatoes, and a large pot of coffee. The 
lads had eaten nothing since breakfast, and 
had not tasted maple syrup for a long time. 

Mahota enjoyed the white man’s feast as 
much as Hiram and Tubby. Several times 
he filled his cup with black coffee, which he 
sweetened with maple syrup. 

“ Ugh, Mahota,” asked Tubby, “ how can 
you drink that? ” 

But Mahota only smiled and said: “ It is 
very good black soup.” 

“ That maple syrup,” the host remarked, 
“ I bring out, only for a feast. Sugar- 


72 


THE SIOUX RUXNER 


maples do not grow in this country. The 
box-elder trees have plenty of sweet sap, but 
it is so watery that it takes too much time 
to boil it down. A friend sent me this little 
keg from St. Louis.” 

When the feast was over, the lads took a 
look at their horses, and let the animals take 
a drink from two barrels now filled with rain¬ 
water. 

The rain was still playing on the roof, and 
to its music the tired lads soon fell asleep in 
their bunks, filled with plenty of soft hay. 


CHAPTER IX 

Old Dacotah’s Story 

When Tubby opened his eyes in the 
morning, he was much puzzled for a moment 
to make out where he was. During some 
two weeks’ travel he had become accustomed 
to wake up in the open, in a brush shelter 
or in a tepee, and sometimes he woke up be¬ 
cause he was chilly, when the night grew 
coolest a short time before sunrise. 

There was an abundant white man’s 
breakfast, and when the meal was over, Old 
Dacotah and Mahota sat down outside the 
stockade to talk. Mahota seemed to be in 
no hurry to get away, and the old man talked 
and laughed as if his own sons had, at last, 
come home for a long visit. 

Much of the talk was carried on in 
English, but at times they dropped uncon¬ 
sciously into Sioux. Then, realizing that 

Hiram and Tubby could not understand 

73 


74 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


them, one or the other would repeat the sub¬ 
stance of the talk in English. 

The old man had lived on the Missouri for 
twenty years. He had hunted and traded 
with the Indians and had many warm per¬ 
sonal friends among them. 

“ I never cheated them,” he told the boys. 
“ I never lie to them, and when an Indian 
comes to me in trouble, I help him the same 
as I would a white man. A hunter with a 
broken leg lay in that bunk for three weeks 
last year. As soon as he was well enough his 
friends carried him down to the river, and 
his sons took him home in a bull-boat, be¬ 
cause he was not yet able to ride a horse.” 

Mahota said very little, and both Hiram 
and Tubby hoped that the old man would 
tell them more of the miners that passed his 
fort soon after the ice went out, but the mind 
of the old man seemed to run to other mat¬ 
ters. 

“ Aren’t you afraid of bad Indians,” asked 
Tubby, “ now that there is war between the 
Indians and the whites? ” 

“ Here in my fort,” replied the old man, 


OLD DACOTAH’S STORY 


75 


“ I am not exactly afraid of them, but I am 
always on the lookout. I would be afraid to 
travel as you lads have been doing, or to go 
hunting any distance from my fort. Dur¬ 
ing the day I tie up two of my dogs outside 
and let one of them run loose. In that way 
I feel pretty sure no war party can surprise 
me.” 

Then he told how two small war parties of 
young rogues, as he called them, had tried 
to get into his fort. The last party had 
visited him when he was all alone in the fort. 
His woodcutters had become scared when 
news of the outbreak in Minnesota reached 
them, and had all deserted him. 

A few days later, in the middle of the 
afternoon, five or six young fellows, prob¬ 
ably some of Inkpadoota’s outlaws, asked to 
be let into the fort to trade. 

“ I got a good peep at them through a 
crack in the gate,” he related laughing. 
“ They were all strangers to me and I didn’t 
like their looks. If they once got inside, I 
would be at their mercy, and I suspected 
that some more young red bandits were hid- 


76 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


mg in the timber. If my three woodchop- 
pers had been with me, I might have let the 
Indians in, but now I had to get rid of them 
in some way.” 

Then he told with much glee how he 
worked a ruse on his would-be scalpers. In 
order to make them believe he was not alone, 
he called his men by name, and told them in 
Sioux to get to their portholes. 

“We had a half-dozen guns in the fort, 
some loaded with ball and some with buck¬ 
shot and I moved pretty lively,” he said, 
“ from one porthole to the other. 

“ When the Indians saw the first gun- 
barrel, they broke for the timber and began 
firing at the palisade. 

“ That didn’t worry me much,” the old 
man chuckled. “ In fact, I began to hope, 
for I could tell from their shooting that there 
were only five or six of them. 

“ But now I noticed another danger. 
One of the rogues began to climb a tree. I 
reckon they had a suspicion that I was fool¬ 
ing them as to the number of men in my fort. 
Thus far I had not fired a shot, although I 


OLD DACOTAH’S STORY 77 

knew where several of the rascals were hid¬ 
den. Well, I sent a ball toward the fellow 
in the tree, making a big white blaze, but I 
took care not to hit the man. I thought he 
would come down but he didn’t; he kept on 
going up. Without losing time I sent him 
a load of buckshot from another porthole. 

“ I reckon one of the shots must have hit 
him in the arm, because he slid out of that 
tree at double-quick and ran for the timber 
as fast as he could go.” 

Then the old man told how he began to 
fear that they might try to set fire to his 
fort after dark. It had rained the day be¬ 
fore and the day was cloudy, still the thatch 
of grasses and rushes on the sheds could have 
been easily fired. 

“ I now began to shoot freely from each 
porthole to impress them with my strength, 
but I awaited the coming of night with much 
dread. I could not be sure if my ruse had 
fooled them or not. 

“ Just before dark I made me some tea, 
for I expected to be on the watch all night. 
I ate my supper and drank my tea without 


78 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


sitting down, going from loophole to loop¬ 
hole in my effort to locate some of my callers. 

“ When it was quite dark I turned two of 
the dogs out, and from the way they acted I 
could tell that the Indians had left. I 
reckon my ruse had really fooled them. 

“ But I sat up in the dark till midnight, 
and at dawn of day I was awake again. 

“Now I have bolted a big chain to my 
gate and fixed it so that I can fasten it after 
I open it just a little bit. I can take a good 
look at anybody outside, and no strange In¬ 
dian gets into my fort while I am able to 
poke a gun through the opening. 

“ Plenty of men have been scared out of 
the country, but I am going to stick, lads. 
Old Dacotah is going to stick right here, 
where he can see the old Big Muddy and the 
cotton wood-trees and the wild roses in sum¬ 
mer and watch the ice going out in spring. 
Right here, in his fort I stick. It’s my home, 
war, or no war, and if any of Inkpadoota’s 
rogues want their heads blown off, just let 
them try their dirty tricks on Old Dacotah.” 


CHAPTER X 
On the Long Trail 

Old Dacotah was much disappointed 
when he learned that the lads would not stay 
with him for a long visit. 

“ I am a little bit selfish in my invitation,” 
he told them freely. “ Until this trouble is 
over, it is not any too safe for a white man 
to live all by himself in the Sioux country. 
But I am going to stick. I have no other 
home, and I am too old to start roaming 
again. Some day my bones will be laid to 
rest, where I can see the Missouri when the 
angel’s trumpet wakes me up.” 

The four Idaho miners had stayed only 
one night with him, he told the lads. They 
were not Kansas men, two had come from 
Missouri and two from Kentucky. “ They 
had a lot of gold-dust with them,” he related, 
“ and they were in a hurry to get out of the 
Indian country.” 


79 


80 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


“Gold-dust/’ repeated Tubby; “what 
does that look like? Is it really dust? ” 

“ No, son,” the old man replied with a 
smile, “it is not really dust. It isn’t shiny, 
either. It looks like black sand, almost like 
gunpowder, only not quite so black. But it 
is heavy, son, heavier than lead. 

“ Those four miners had a little fun with 
Old Dacotah. They dropped their leather 
gold-belts in my water bucket and told me 
if I would carry them down to the boat for 
them, they would give me half a belt. I 
laughed at them, and told them I was not 
in the habit of robbing my guests. But 
when they bet me half a gold-belt against 
a buffalo robe, they got this old man’s 
blood stirred up, and I made a grab at the 
pail. 

“ But the bunch got the laugh on me. You 
wouldn’t believe it, son, but I couldn’t lift 
that bucket off the floor. 

“ One of them, who had some learning, 
told me that a large bucketful of gold-dust 
weighs about as much as a pony. 

“ The Idaho men had been lucky. They 


ON THE LONG TRAIL 81 

had a lot of dust of their own and also 
brought out a good deal for friends. ,, 

Mahota who had said very little during 
the whole visit, in fact Old Dacotah had done 
most of the talking, now started to trade for 
a number of things. He bought a deerskin 
tepee of very light weight, a quantity of am¬ 
munition, three Colt pistols, firing six shots 
each, and a double-barrel shotgun. 

He also bought a good pony of the old 
man and a bundle. “ Each of us needs two 
horses,’’ he explained. “ Hocang the badger 
and the funny little prairie dogs dig many 
holes on the prairie, and sometimes a pony 
steps into a hole and breaks his leg.” 

Tubby was curious to know what was in 
the bundle, but Mahota only smiled and re¬ 
marked, “ Some day, when we need it, you 
will see it.” 

Then he turned to the old man and said, 
“ My father, you must write all this down in 
your book, and if we ever come back, we shall 
pay you.” 

“ Do you trust other Indians, too? ” asked 
Tubby with boyish frankness. 


82 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


“ I trust many of them, many of them,” 
replied the old man smiling and looking at 
Mahota. 

“ My brothers will pay you if I do not 
come back,” said Mahota seriously. 

“ I know they will,” the old trader as¬ 
sented. “ Several times Indians have paid 
me the debts of their relatives who had died. 
My Indian friends are more honest than 
most white men.” 

Early next morning the lads left their 
friendly host. “ I will give you my big dog, 
Pluto,” the old man offered. “ He is a good 
Indian-fighter.” 

“ My father, we thank you for your offer,” 
Mahota replied, “ but we must not take the 
big dog. His feet would get sore when we 
travel over the prickly cactus, and a dog 
often barks when he should keep still. 

“We must depend on our good eyes to 
see danger ahead. We shall travel with 
great caution and we shall fight hard, if we 
must fight.” 

When the old man shook the hands of the 
lads, he had tears in his eyes. “ Good-bye, 


OH THE LONG TRAIL 


83 


my sons,” he said; “you are going on a 
dangerous journey, almost on a fool’s er¬ 
rand, but I know that Mahota’s eyes are 
keen; he is a swift runner and a good horse¬ 
man. I shall look for you before the Mis¬ 
souri freezes over again. And if you and 
your brothers ever reach Old Dacotah’s fort, 
your lives and your gold-dust will be safe.” 

The lads sprang into the saddles. 
“ Good-bye, my father,” Mahota repeated. 
“We must now travel, because we must keep 
well ahead of the soldiers and the fire-canoes 
of General Sully.” 

Tubby and Hiram were very happy to be 
once more on the way, and just before the 
trader’s fort disappeared from view, Tubby 
turned in the saddle and gave a shout and 
cried: “Good-bye, father! We’ll soon be 
back and give you a lot of dust for the 
pony!” 

But Mahota was silent and looked as if 
he were thinking of some very serious busi¬ 
ness. 

The lads noticed that he led the way to¬ 
ward the northwest and was drawing away 


84 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


from the river. Both lads had expected that 
he would call at Fort Pierre, which was an 
important trading-post, and it seemed to 
them that they should inquire for their 
brothers at that place. 

But Mahota explained to them that they 
would only lose time, and expose themselves 
to more danger, if they called at Fort Pierre. 

“ My white father often goes to Fort 
Pierre,” he told the boys, “ and if your 
brothers had been there, he would know it. 
There are always Indians at Fort Pierre, but 
we cannot tell if their hearts are good or 
bad toward white men. Some bad Indians 
might follow us and make much trouble for 
us. 

“ We shall strike the river again at a bend 
on the other side of Medicine Butte. That 
is a high hill, which stands on the prairie near 
the river.” 

When Tubby yelled at a badger that was 
sunning himself in front of his hole, Mahota 
looked displeased. 

“ My brother,” he cautioned the lad, “ we 
must not make much noise. A man who is 


ON THE LONG TRAIL 


85 


travelling now in the Sioux country must 
keep his eyes and his ears open, but his 
mouth must be shut.” 

“ There are no Indians here,” replied 
Tubby. 

“ Indians are often close by when white 
men do not see them,” was Mahota’s reproof. 
“ When you travel with Mahota, it is enough 
if your eyes and ears are open.” 

Toward evening they crossed a small river, 
which ran through a wide valley, in which 
they saw many clumps of low box-elders, 
some bushy elm-trees, and small thickets of 
buffalo-berries, which were covered with 
small yellowish flowers. 

“ When the days grow short,” Mahota 
told the lads, “ these bushes have red berries. 
They are sour, but they are good if they are 
boiled with buffalo meat.” 

It was plain that the water in this river 
was even more muddy than the water in the 
Missouri. The river had run high after the 
recent big rain, but was now little more than 
a string of muddy pools. At one of these 
pools Mahota stopped to let the horses drink, 


86 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


and Tubby was surprised to see that they 
seemed to like the water, although it looked 
like “ mud soup.” 

The lads had struck the river opposite a 
small creek, and when they had followed the 
creek up for about a mile, Mahota stopped 
in a clump of willows and cottonwoods and 
said, “ Here we sleep to-night. I have seen 
no tracks or signs of Indians to-day, and 
Tubby may build a small fire of dry sticks 
and cook us something to eat.” 

The white lads were surprised to discover 
that Mahota had stopped within a rod of a 
fine spring. It ran just a little bit, but 
within a few minutes Tubby had filled a 
kettle with perfectly clear water, and both 
he and Hiram declared that it was the best 
water they had ever tasted. 

“ I am glad you found this spring,” said 
Tubby. “ I was afraid we would have to 
drink some of that mud soup.” 

While they were eating their supper and 
drinking some very good refreshing tea, 
Mahota told his companions that Fort Pierre 
was six or seven miles toward the rising sun. 


ON THE LONG TRAIL 


87 


“ This creek,” he continued, “ white men 
at the fort call Willow Creek, and the river 
we crossed they call Bad River, and the 
Sioux call it Seecha, which means bad.” 

“ It should be called 4 Soup River,’ ” sug¬ 
gested Tubby. 

“ Most of the rivers in this country are 
soup rivers,” Mahota admitted, “ and the In¬ 
dian hunters are glad if the pools are not all 
dry, but the water is not so bad as it looks.” 

The horses were enjoying the fine new 
grass, and when the stars came out, the air 
grew delightfully cool. 

“ It is not going to rain,” predicted 
Mahota. “ So we need not set up the tepee, 
but we shall spread the tepee skin over our 
blankets, so the cool wind cannot strike us.” 

Thus ended the first day on the long trail. 


CHAPTER XI 

Signs of Danger 

The stars were still shining when Ma- 
hota called his white friends. “ You 
must rise now, brothers,” he spoke urgently. 
“ This is not a safe camp after the sun comes 
up. Some Indians may pass here on their 
way to Fort Pierre, or some may be coming 
from the fort.” 

“ I was awake several times,” Hiram re¬ 
plied, “ and I sat up and listened for sounds 
of danger, but I heard only the stamping 
and grazing of our horses and the howling 
of wolves far off.” 

“ We were safe during the night,” 
Mahota agreed. “ Indians very seldom 
travel at night, but they generally start early 
in the morning. We must leave now, be¬ 
cause many Indians know this spring.” 

It was difficult to wake Tubby. At last 

after Hiram had nudged him several times 

88 


SIGNS OF DANGER 


89 


and taken away his blankets, he sat up, but 
he was still asleep. 

“ Look out, Hiram,” he called, “ look 
out. You’ll wake the old man and the 
dogs.” 

“ Get up, brother, get up! ” Hiram spoke 
friendly. “ You have been sleeping like a 
rock. Mahota says we must travel or the 
Sioux may catch us.” 

At the word “ Sioux ” Tubby did wake 
up, and in a very short time the horses were 
saddled and the three friends were again on 
the way. 

Mahota was following up the course of 
Willow Creek, but he kept to the open 
prairie west of the stream. 

“ As long as it is dark,” he said, “ we may 
travel where the going is easiest.” 

“ How do we know where we are going 
in the dark? ” Tubby wondered. “ I would 
get turned around if I did not see the bushes 
along the creek.” 

“ Tubby, I believe you are still asleep,” 
Hiram chided his younger brother. “ Don’t 
you see that we are travelling by the stars? 


90 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


Look at the dipper and the north star. We 
are going just a little west of north.” 

Tubby looked up at the stars. “ I guess 
you are right,” he admitted. “ But I don’t 
think I ever saw the dipper on the west side 
of the north star.” 

“ Because you were always asleep at this 
time in the morning. Now keep awake, 
Tubby, so you don’t fall off your horse.” 

“ I’m awake,” Tubby protested. “ I am 
too cold to fall asleep. I wish I could wrap 
a blanket around me.” 

When daylight came Mahota left the 
open prairie and made careful use of the 
cover of bushes and small trees along the 
creek. 

They had been travelling about two hours 
when the sun rose with a blaze of friendly 
light over the top of Medicine Butte, and 
both Tubby and Hiram felt as if they had 
safely lived through a night of many 
dangers. 

But upon Mahota the coming of daylight 
had a different effect. He scanned the 
plain to right and left and kept a sharp look- 


SIGNS OF DANGER 91 

out ahead on the timber at the bend of the 
Missouri. 

When they arrived within half a mile of 
the timber, he turned sharp to the right and 
rode briskly into an open grove of cotton¬ 
woods, where there was no underbrush. 

“ I think, brothers, we are safe here,” he 
said, as he stopped and looked sharp in every 
direction. “It is always dangerous to ap¬ 
proach timber over the open prairie. But 
we had to do it or remain all day in the open. 
Now we can stop a little while to eat.” 

“ May I run over and climb Medicine 
Butte? ” asked Tubby. “ I shall be back by 
the time Hiram has breakfast ready, and I 
feel like taking a good run.” 

Mahota looked with a friendly smile at the 
lad who was shivering in the cool morning 
air. 

“ My little big brother,” he replied, “ if 
you ran to the top of Medicine Butte, we 
would have to wait here for you till it is 
time to eat supper, and perhaps you would 
never come back. The butte is eight miles 
away, and some Indians might see you, and 


92 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


they would cut you off and take your scalp, 
and laugh at the fool white boy. 

“ Most Indians can see things a long way 
off on the plains, and some of them have also 
learned to use the white man’s spy-glasses. 
No, little big brother, you cannot run to 
Medicine Butte.” 

Tubby stepped out in the open and took a 
careful look at the top of the butte, noticing 
several trees, clumps of bushes, and a wide 
stretch of open plain that lay between their 
camp and the top of the butte. “ I guess you 
are right, Mahota,” he admitted. “ When I 
take a careful look, I can see that the butte 
is a long way off, but when you just look at 
the top without seeing the things between, it 
surely looks as if a fellow might climb to the 
top in about fifteen minutes.” 

When the meal was finished Mahota led 
the way along the edge of the timber remain¬ 
ing under cover much of the time. He had 
exchanged several pieces of canvas for buck¬ 
skins at Old Dacotah’s fort. “ White man’s 
canvas,” he now remarked, “ is bad for 
travelling through dangerous country. It 


SIGNS OF DANGER 


93 


can be seen as far as a white or spotted pony. 
I have tied our things in buckskins and buf¬ 
falo robes, because they look more like the 
prairie and the rocks.” 

About noon they came to a place where 
a small creek, now known as Chantier Creek, 
comes in from the prairie and it was at this 
place that the lads noticed the first signs of 
Indians. Some ponies had crossed the creek 
and had stopped to drink at a water-hole. 

The lads dismounted and carefully ex¬ 
amined the tracks. There had been seven or 
eight ponies. 

“ They were not wild ponies,” Mahota de¬ 
clared. “ Some Indians were riding them, 
and they crossed here yesterday.” 

“ How can you tell that? ” asked Tubby. 

“ The tracks are too deep,” Mahota ex¬ 
plained, “ for wild ponies who carry no 
riders. They are still fresh, but the sand is 
beginning to fall into them. If they had 
been made this morning, the sand would still 
be moist and standing up.” 

Hiram wondered where the Indians had 
been going. “ They may be on their way to 


94 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


Fort Pierre, or they may be scouts who are 
going to find out what General Sully and 
his soldiers are doing; or they may be just a 
roving party of young hunters,” Mahota ex¬ 
plained. 

“ I think we missed them only by a mile or 
two. They were probably travelling west 
of us along Willow Creek, while we were 
crossing over the prairie between Willow 
Creek and the timber on the Missouri. It 
may be that they have seen us, and I am 
sure that they will see our tracks along the 
creek and will find our camp at the little 
spring. 

“ I think, my brothers,” he continued after 
thinking for a while, “ that they cannot tell 
that there are white men in our party. We 
built only a small Indian fire, and I looked 
over our camp to make sure that we left no 
white man’s things. 

“ If they knew that there were white men 
in our party, I fear that they would follow 
us. We must watch our back trail and 
travel with great care, for we are getting 
nearer to the big Sioux camps north of us. 


SIGNS OF DANGEE 


95 


“ Perhaps we should cross over to the 
other side of the Missouri. The grass and 
the water are better on that side, and I be¬ 
lieve that most of the Sioux are camping in 
the Bad Lands on this side of the big river. 
They think that the soldiers cannot follow 
them into the Bad Lands.” 

During the afternoon, the lads travelled 
with great caution up the small creek, but 
they saw no Indians or signs of danger, and 
all the game they saw was feeding or resting 
quietly and showed no signs of having been 
disturbed by hunters. 

When it was still early in the afternoon, 
they came to a large clump of bushes of 
buffalo-berry. Mahota said this was the 
last timber on the creek, and they had better 
camp here for the night. 

They found enough water in several pools 
of the creek, but it was quite alkaline, and 
Tubby spit when he tasted it; but Mahota 
told him that travellers and hunters in that 
country were always glad if they found 
water at all. 

“ Some day, when we have to make a dry 


96 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


camp,” he told Tubby, “ my little big 
brother will wish that he could run back and 
take a drink at the water-hole in the bull- 
berry-bushes.” 


CHAPTER XII 

Making a Stand 

Next morning Mahota again started 
early without waiting to eat any breakfast, 
a plan of travel which Tubby disliked very 
much. But Mahota was afraid that the In¬ 
dians, whose trail they had crossed on Chan- 
tier Creek, might follow them. 

“ If we start very early,” he told his 
friends, “ they will see that we are too far 
ahead and they may give up following us.” 

“ Mahota,” asked Tubby, “ do you think 
they would start a fight with us? ” 

“ I cannot tell,” the young guide ex¬ 
plained. “ If they are sensible men, they 
would let us go in peace if I told them why 
we were travelling through the Sioux 
country. But if they are some of the bad 
young men of Inkpadoota, they would want 
to get our horses and our goods, and they 
would most of all want to take the scalps of 
two white men.” 


97 


98 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


“Horrors!” exclaimed Tubby, and ran 
his hand through his hair. “ Wouldn’t they 
want your scalp, too? ” 

“ Our fathers have always taught us that 
it is wrong for one Sioux to kill another, but 
the Indians think it is a brave thing to take 
the scalp of a white man in war, and the 
white soldiers have now made war in the 
Sioux country for two years. If I did not 
fight them they would not kill me, because 
they would be afraid that my friends and 
brothers would learn who killed me and 
would avenge my death.” 

Then he told his friends that their route 
for the day would lead over open country 
nearly all day, and that he wished to cross 
the Cheyenne River before the sun set and 
then find a good camp on one of the many 
small creeks that run into the north side of 
that river. 

“ Sometimes,” he concluded, “ a river in 
the Sioux country rises very much in a few 
hours and runs so full and mad that men 
and horses cannot cross it. For that reason 
good scouts and runners always cross a river 


MAKING A STAND 


99 


before they make camp, then they are sure 
that they will not have to wait a day or two 
to let a flood run by. We have to travel 
about twenty miles before we strike the 
Cheyenne River.” 

There was very little talk after this. 
Mahota told the lads that they might eat a 
piece of meat while they were travelling, 
and when they reached a pool of water in a 
buffalo wallow, they stopped to let the horses 
drink. “We must drink from our canteens 
to-day,” he told the boys. “We shall find 
plenty of good water at the Cheyenne 
River.” 

When they had travelled about ten miles 
and had just passed a low butte to their left, 
Mahota suddenly stopped his pony, pointed 
to the east and called, “ Sioux! ” 

Over a low rise ten mounted Indians were 
coming toward them. Hiram and Tubby 
started for a piece of brush and small timber 
in a hollow northward, but Mahota called 
them back sharply. “ This way,” he called. 
“ Too much brush to keep them out. We 
must make a stand in the open,” and he rode 


100 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


at full speed to an open space a little to the 
west, where he stopped and dismounted in 
a dry buffalo wallow. 

“ All get in here! ” he ordered. “ Tubby, 
tie the horses together, so they cannot stam¬ 
pede! Hiram, take the shovel and make 
three mounds. Then lie down, you and 
Tubby. I shall talk to them.” 

When the Indians saw that the three men 
were going to make a stand against them, 
they stopped for a council, which gave the 
three friends a few moments to collect their 
thoughts. 

“ Who are they? ” asked Hiram. 

“ They are young men. Bad fellows, I 
fear,” Mahota replied. 

“ Mahota, you aren’t going off to talk with 
them? ” asked Tubby anxiously. 

“ No, brother, not in words,” Mahota an¬ 
swered. “ I shall talk to them in sign, if 
they come near enough.” 

The Sioux were approaching now, nine of 
them, and Mahota stepped out, raised the 
palms of both hands toward them and mo¬ 
tioned them not to approach. 


MAKING A STAND 


101 


“ I can understand that sign,” Tubby 
spoke. “ It means: Keep off! ” 

One of the Sioux made some signs in re¬ 
ply. “ He says, 4 Trade horses/ ” Mahota 
interpreted, and he replied, “No trade 
horses.” 

“ See your goods,” the Sioux demanded. 
“ Show no goods,” Mahota signed. 

Then the nine Sioux held another brief 
council, after which the leader signalled: 
“We are hungry; give us meat.” “No 
meat to give,” Mahota replied. “ Plenty 
game on prairie.” 

The nine were coming slowly nearer and 
Mahota now levelled his rifle at them and 
then repeated the sign: “ Do not approach. 
Leave us.” 

The leader now made a gesture of defiance 
and then rubbed the palm of his right hand 
over the back of his left. 

“ What is he saying? ” asked Hiram. 

“ He says, ‘ Dirty white dogs. We are 
going to rub you out/ ” replied Mahota. 

“The measly scoundrels!” exclaimed 
Tubby, who had now gotten over his first 


102 THE SIOUX RUNNER 

scare. “ We'll show them who gets rubbed 
out! ” 

Once more Mahota signalled: “ Keep 
away,” and after holding up both his gun 
and his pistol, he added, “We have bad- 
medicine guns.” 

But the Sioux paid no attention to his 
warning; yelling like so many demons, they 
began to race furiously around the three 
men, and several of them, who had no guns, 
began to shoot arrows at the stalled lads, 
and although they were still out of effec¬ 
tive range, they were gradually drawing 
nearer. 

“ Hold your fire, brothers, till I give the 
word,” ordered Mahota as he got down be¬ 
hind his mound. “ Hiram, take the shot¬ 
gun!” 

The Sioux now began to discharge their 
guns freely, but most of the shots went en¬ 
tirely wild. 

“ Rotten shooting! Oh, rotten shoot¬ 
ing! ” muttered Tubby, who by this time had 
lost all fear. 

Mahota, who had acquired the discipline, 



I? Titf- 








Once more Mahota signalled 


“Keep away!” — Page 102 , 




MAKING- A STAND 103 

self-control, and fearlessness of a white sol¬ 
dier in addition to his training as an Indian 
scout and runner, let the Sioux approach 
within thirty yards before he called, 
“ Fire!” 

At the crack of three guns, one Sioux 
dropped off his horse, one bent over and, 
clinging to his pony’s neck, rode out of 
range, and one pony dropped in his tracks, 
pitching his rider forward, apparently badly 
injured. 

The other six raiders uttered a yell of rage 
and rushed out of range, but one of them 
jumped off his horse and threw a lariat 
around the feet of the dead man to drag him 
away. Mahota, whose fighting blood was 
up, was going to fire at him, but Hiram 
begged his friend to desist: “ Let him go, 
Mahota. Let him take his dead comrade. 
We are Christians. I think these heathen 
have had enough.” 

“ Heathen? ” exclaimed Mahota enraged. 
“ They are not heathens. They are devils. 
Some of Inkpadoota’s young devils. They 
should all be killed. They have brought 


104 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


much trouble to our people.” But he al¬ 
lowed the dead man to be dragged away. 

The raiders, whoever they were, had ap¬ 
parently had enough fighting. They made 
some more signs of defiance and called the 
three men ‘‘Dirty white dogs”; but they 
kept carefully out of range. 

Mahota now motioned them to come on 
and fight some more, but they tied the dead 
man on his pony’s back and rode off to the 
south, one of the horses carrying two men. 

“ Look at the cruel brutes! ” cried Tubby 
indignantly. “ Two big scoundrels riding 
one poor little pony! ” 


CHAPTER XIII 

Mahota’s Advice 

When Mahota was convinced that, for the 
present at least, the Sioux had given up the 
attack, he asked his white friends if they 
were wounded. 

“ In the excitement of a fight a man some¬ 
times does not feel that he is hit,” he told 
them. 

“ I have a scratch on my left arm,” 
Hiram replied. “ The horses started to act 
wild and I jumped up to quiet them and 
that’s the time they nearly got me. It be¬ 
gins to smart pretty badly now.” 

Mahota quickly dressed the wound with 
some kind of salve and a clean bandage, both 
of which he had brought from Old Dacotah’s 
store for just such emergencies. 

“ It is only a skin wound,” he said. “ It 
will soon heal.” 

Mahota and Tubby had not been hit at 

all, but two of the horses had each an arrow 

105 


106 


THE SIOUX RUXXER 


sticking in its skin, and one of the pack- 
horses was so badly wounded that he had to 
be killed. 

Mahota now asked the lads to repack the 
goods and blankets, while he went scouting 
over the ridge to make sure that the Sioux 
were not trying to work some ruse on them. 
“ An Indian war party,” he said, “ knows 
many tricks. If these rascals should be a 
part of a larger party, they might come back 
at us with more men and more caution, or 
they might try to ambush us to-morrow.” 

“ Hiram, I can’t understand,” asked 
Tubby while the two were getting the packs 
in shape, “ why the Sioux did not kill all our 
horses. Anybody can hit a horse.” 

“ It’s the horses they were after,” Hiram 
replied. “ But even if they tried to hit 
them, you must remember that shooting 
from a fast running horse is not an easy 
thing, even for an expert marksman. I 
think their plan was first to get us confused 
and get the horses to stampede, so they could 
catch them, and then it would have been easy 
to get us, too.” 


MAHOTA’S ADVICE 


107 


Mahota ran swiftly up the ridge, behind 
which the Sioux had disappeared, but before 
he could look over, he threw himself flat on 
the ground and crawled to the top, where he 
lay quite still behind a rock. 

“ I think they are really going,” he re¬ 
ported on his return. “ I could see some an¬ 
telopes, also a few elk and buffaloes, and 
they were all feeding or lying down. They 
had not been chased by Indian hunters, so 
I think there are no more Indians near our 
trail and we should now go on our way to 
cross the Cheyenne before dark.” 

His wrath against the raiders had not 
abated. “We should have killed them all,” 
he said, his eyes flashing with anger. “You 
call them heathen, Hiram? They are no 
heathen. They are murderers. Cut-throats 
they are. Big fools, too. 

“ Only a few years ago all our people lived 
happily on their hunting-grounds. The 
Yanktons, my people, on the Missouri, the 
Sissetons on the Red River and the Jim 
River and the Santees on the Minnesota. 

“ Then Inkpadoota and his outlaws and 



108 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


Little Crow and his foolish young Santees 
began to kill white people, old men and 
women and children. Many Santees had 
learned to raise corn and spotted buffaloes, 
and their women and children were happy. 
When General Sibley came with the soldiers, 
Little Crow ran away to Canada. And now 
the Santees and Sissetons are hiding like 
rabbits and coyotes in the Bad Lands. And 
it is Inkpadoota and Little Crow and their 
foolish young warriors who have brought all 
this misery on our people. But now, my 
brothers, we must travel, so we can cross the 
Cheyenne before the sun goes down.” 

Tubby was bubbling over with questions. 
He wanted to know more about Inkpadoota 
and his outlaw Indians, and about Little 
Crow, about whom the papers had printed 
so many stories two years ago. Why didn’t 
the Sioux leave their dead man on the 
prairie? Where would they take the body? 
Why did Mahota not make a stand in the 
patch of brush and timber? 

But Mahota was not disposed to talk. 
“ My little big brother,” he said, “ it is not 


MAHOTA’S ADVICE 


109 


good to talk much on the trail. Your eyes 
and ears and your mind should be on the 
trail. Then you will know of danger, even 
if your eyes cannot see it. Many white 
men have lost their lives because they 
talked much on the trail and rode into 
dangers which their mind should have seen. 

“ When we have pitched our tepee beyond 
the Cheyenne, we can make plenty of talk.” 


CHAPTER XIV 
Mahota’s Pinto 

Before they reached the Cheyenne, they 
crossed another trail of horses, but Mahota, 
after he had carefully examined the tracks, 
declared that the tracks had been made by 
wild ponies that roamed about in small 
herds. 

The Indians in those days were constantly 
making raids against the herds of hostile 
tribes. Some ponies escaped from the raid¬ 
ers or from their original owners and became 
entirely wild. 

“ I don’t like the wild ponies,” Mahota 
told his friends. “ If our horses see them, 
we shall have to watch, because they will try 
to run away with them. Ponies and mules 
love lots of company, just like buffaloes.” 

The three again travelled with much cau¬ 
tion after they had examined the tracks of 
the wild horses. 


110 


MAHOTA’S PINTO 


111 


“ Indians always try to drive the wild 
ponies to their own herds, and wherever I 
find wild ponies I look for Indians.” 

Every time the lads were about to cross a 
rise or a ridge, Mahota let Hiram hold his 
saddle-horse, while he lay flat on the ground 
behind a rock or a bush, and let his keen eyes 
run over the country beyond for signs of 
danger. Several times he let his friends ride 
ahead, while he watched their back trail. 
After he was satisfied that all was right, he 
quickly caught up with the two horsemen 
and took his place in the saddle. 

When Tubby asked him if running on foot 
did not make him tired, Mahota replied 
laughing that it did not tire him a little bit. 
“ My father taught me to be a runner when 
I was still a small boy,” he related, “ and he 
made me practise running till I could beat 
all the boys of my age in our camp. One 
day my father told a Teton Sioux, who was 
visiting in our camp, that I could beat his 
son, who was much bigger than I. Now I 
must tell you that Indians are very fond of 
all kinds of races. The Teton man bet a 


112 


THE SIOUX RUXNER 


beautiful spotted pony against a big mule, 
which my father had caught on the prairie. 
My father told me that I might have the 
pinto horse as my own if I won the race, and 
the Teton boy was to have the big mule if 
he won. 

“ There was much noise and excitement in 
our village when the people learned that I 
was to run a race against the big Teton boy. 
There were several Teton families visiting 
in our camp, and each bet one or more ponies 
on their big boy. We ran on the prairie 
near our camp and the posts were a mile 
apart. Some soldiers had put them in, when 
they raced our young men on a Fourth of 
July. 

“ When our old chief clapped his hands 
and shouted, ‘ Go! ’ we both were off. But 
the legs of the Teton boy were so much 
longer than mine that on the first half-mile 
he easily kept ahead of me, and I thought 
he would beat me. But in the second half I 
caught up with him, and when I reached 
the post I was the length of three ponies 
ahead of him. We had made a big feast 


MAHOTA’S PINTO 


113 


for our Teton visitors the evening before, 
and the big boy had eaten much meat and 
corn cake and had danced all night and his 
wind gave out on the long race. 

44 The Yanktons won eleven ponies from 
the Tetons on that race. My father said he 
would bet his big mule again against any 
pony of the Tetons,” Mahota concluded 
laughing as he lived the race over again, 
44 but the Teton boy said he felt sick and 
wouldn’t run again.” 

44 Did you get the pinto horse? ” asked 
Tubby. 

44 1 did, little big brother,” Mahota an¬ 
swered still chuckling, 44 and I rode him till I 
was a big boy and lost him on a hunting trip. 
He was a very good horse and kept himself 
in good condition during the worst winter. 
When the snow was deep I cut down cotton¬ 
wood-trees for him, and I also taught him to 
eat corn.” 

44 Tell us how you lost him,” Tubby urged. 

44 My father and I and several other 
Yanktons,” the Indian related, 44 had gone to 
hunt buffalo toward the Pawnee country, 


114 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


north of the Republican River in Nebraska. 
The Pawnees are poor warriors, but they are 
great horse-thieves, and one night, when we 
were all asleep, the Pawnees sneaked up on 
our camp and stole every one of our horses. 

“ My father held a council arid said, ‘ We 
were fools to let the Pawnees steal our 
horses. We cannot go home on foot, for all 
the squaws will laugh at us and say that 
Asotah has become an old woman. We 
must now travel south till we can steal horses 
from the Pawnees.’ After we had travelled 
south two nights we found a Pawnee camp. 
We hid ourselves all day near the camp, and 
before midnight each of us caught a horse 
that was staked out on a rope, and then we 
drove away all the loose horses of the Paw¬ 
nees. We travelled all night and next day, 
until the horses grew tired. The Pawnees 
could not follow us, because they had no 
horses left to ride. We came home with 
fifty good Pawnee horses; and the women 
did not laugh at us, but made us a great 
feast, and all the people said, ‘ Asotah is a 
great chief.’ My beautiful pinto horse I 

t f 

i o-' 


V 


MAHOTA’S PINTO 115 

never saw again, but I got another fine pinto 
from the Pawnee herd.” 

When the lads came within three miles of 
the Cheyenne, Hiram and Tubby noticed 
many deep ruts on the prairie all leading to¬ 
ward the Cheyenne. Mahota told them that 
these ruts had been made by the great herds 
of buffaloes that lived in this part of the 
country, before Indians and white hunters 
killed so many of them to sell their skins at 
Fort Pierre and Fort Union. 

“ The buffaloes made the trails,” he told, 
“ when they went to drink at the river, and 
when they came back from the river to feed 
again on the prairie. Now we do not often 
see large herds of buffaloes between Fort 
Pierre and Fort Union near the mouth of 
the Yellowstone. Some Indians think that 
some day the buffaloes will return and the 
white men will go back to their own country. 

“ But my father does not think this will 
happen,” he continued after they had been 
riding in silence for a while. “ He says the 
buffaloes cannot come back, because they are 
dead; and the white men cannot go away, 



116 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


because there are so many of them that they 
cannot go back to their own country. He 
thinks that more white men will come to the 
buffalo country, and that some day the 
whites will build roads and railroads west of 
the Missouri and in the buffalo country 
along the Yellowstone. Then all the buf¬ 
faloes will be killed, and the Indians will 
starve unless they learn to plant corn and 
raise the spotted buffaloes of the white 
people.” 


CHAPTER XV 
The Voice From the Clouds 

When they came near the first scattering 
bushes and trees that indicated the proximity 
of the river, Mahota turned to the left in an 
up-stream direction. 

“We might meet some Indians at this 
ford,” he said. “ It is the crossing nearest 
to the mouth of the river and the Indians use 
it much. We should cross at some place 
farther away from the Missouri. The Chey¬ 
enne is not a deep river and we shall soon 
find another ford if we watch the buffalo 
trails. Buffaloes and elk always find places 
where the banks are not too muddy; and 
where they can cross, our horses can cross.” 

After they had travelled west about two 
miles they noticed that the buffalo trails 
again converged in deep ruts toward the 
river, and they found a good safe ford, where 
the stream was shallow and had a hard bot¬ 
tom. 


117 


118 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


As soon as they reached the river, the 
horses at once stopped and took a long drink, 
but Tubby called the Cheyenne another 
worthless mud-creek. 

“ Are there no clear rivers in this coun¬ 
try?” he asked. 

Mahota replied that all the rivers in the 
Sioux country were like the Missouri it¬ 
self. “ The Cheyenne, the Grand, the Rees’ 
Own River, the Cannon Ball, and the Little 
Missouri, they all run muddy. They are 
worst after a rain, but they are not really 
clear at any time.” 

“ Are there no little clear brooks in your 
country? ” Tubby wanted to know. 

Mahota had never seen any, except some 
very little ones that ran only a short distance 
from a spring. “ There are many little clear 
brooks in the Black Hills,” he added. “ But 
nearly all of them dry up in the foothills. 
Only after a rain and when the snow melts in 
the hills do they reach the Cheyenne or the 
Belle Fourche. The Cannon Ball and the 
Little Missouri are worse than the Cheyenne, 
because they run through country which the 


VOICE FROM THE CLOUDS 119 


whites call Bad Lands; but there are many 
clear streams in the country of the Teton 
Sioux, in the foothills of the great Shining 
Mountains.” 

It was now time to camp, and Mahota 
suggested that they would find a good safe 
camp on one of the many small creeks that 
enter the Cheyenne from the north. Tubby 
pointed out a level grassy patch near a 
creek, which contained fairly clear run¬ 
ning water, and enough for both men and 
horses. 

“ That place looks good, little big 
brother,” the Yankton admitted, “ but it is 
not safe. Even now I see clouds in the west 
and in a little while we shall hear thunder, 
and if it rains much, the little creek may be¬ 
come a big mad river.” 

So they made camp on high ground in 
a patch of wild roses, surrounded by bushes 
of buffalo-berry, small box-elder trees and 
choke-cherry bushes, and prepared for the 
night. 

Mahota set up the tepee and took special 
pains to secure it against a storm. Hiram 



120 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


started to make a feast, which was to consist 
of beans boiled with bacon, dried buffalo 
meat, hardtack, and coffee. He had been 
soaking the beans in his canteen for several 
hours, for he knew that beans and peas do 
not get done quickly if they are not first 
soaked for an hour or two. In order to give 
a flavor to the soup, he added a pinch of the 
small seed-like wild onions that grow on top 
of the stalks, where in other plants only true 
seeds are produced. 

It was Tubby’s duty to picket the horses, 
and get wood and water. “You had better 
get plenty of dry wood for to-morrow, also, 
while you are about it,” Hiram suggested, 
“ and pile it up in the tepee.” 

Hiram did his cooking outside, but 
Mahota built a small fire in the center of the 
tepee, saying, “ To-night we make a camp 
just like Indians, and we must make our 
feast in the tepee, because the clouds are 
coming up.” 

s 

The lads had not made camp any too 
early. Hiram had scarcely finished his cook¬ 
ing when it grew dark. A violent wind 


VOICE FROM THE CLOUDS 121 


rushed over the prairie, and beat the bushes 
and trees about so wildly that it looked as 
if they might be torn up by the roots. Dark 
ashen clouds were driven hurriedly eastward, 
and frequent flashes of lightning shot across 
the sky and were followed by long, deep, 
rumbling thunder. The lads were sitting 
around the fire in the tepee, uncertain 
whether they should begin to eat their sup¬ 
per. 

“ Mahota, did the missionaries ever read 
the Psalms with you? ” asked Hiram. 
“ When a storm comes up I can’t help think¬ 
ing of the twenty-ninth Psalm. My father 
sometimes read it to us, when a thunderstorm 

passed over our homestead in Kansas. I 

* 

know much of it by heart.” 

“ Yes, they translated some of the Psalms 
for us,” Mahota replied. “ The Indians be¬ 
lieve that the Great Spirit speaks in the 
thunder of the clouds. Please take out your 
Bible and read that Psalm to us.” 

“ I think I never really understood it until 
now,” said Hiram when he had finished read¬ 
ing. “ But now I can sort of feel what it 


122 THE SIOUX RUXXER 

means. I wonder if David wrote it while 
he was hiding from Saul in the desert. I 
like these verses best: 

“ 4 The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars; 
yea, the Lord breaketh the cedars of Lebanon. 
The voice of the Lord divideth the flame of fire. 
The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness of 
Kadesh.’ 

“ I feel as if we were in the wilderness of 
Kadesh / 5 Hiram concluded, “ and I fancy 
that the voice of the Lord on Mount Sinai 
sounded to Moses like the thunder here on 
the Missouri and among the buttes of the 
Bad Lands . 55 

The lads were ravenously hungry, and 
they ate their feast almost in silence, while 
outside the storm raged and a gushing rain 
played its wild music on the tepee. 

“ Mighty thankful I am , 55 Tubby spoke 
up, “ that we are not outside sitting under 
a switching bush. I wish our horses were in 
a dry shed . 55 

“ They don’t mind the rain , 55 Mahota as¬ 
serted. “ They like it, if it does not get too 
cold. It washes the dust out of their coats . 55 


VOICE FROM THE CLOUDS 123 


For a while the lads ate again in silence 
listening to the sublime drama of the storm 
and rain outside of their small tepee. 

“ The Psalm says that the voice of the 
Lord breaketh the cedars,” Mahota said, 
when the wild fury of the storm began to 
abate a little. “ When you read that, 
Hiram, I thought of the old crooked cedars 
that grow on the rims of the canyons and on 
the buttes of the Bad Lands. Nearly all of 
them have been struck by lightning, and 
their dead branches stand up like the horns 
of a big elk. The Indians sometimes hunt 
the bighorn mountain sheep on the high 
buttes, but we never seek shelter under the 
cedars on the rim of the canj^ons or the edges 
of the buttes. When a storm overtakes us 
we hide under some low bushes at the head 
of a canyon or along its sides. The bottom 
of a canyon is a dangerous place in a storm 
on account of sudden floods that gather after 
a heavy rain.” 

By this time the fury of the storm had 
passed over. The violent crashes of thun¬ 
der, which for a time had been shaking the 


124 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


rocks along the creek, had passed on to a 
distance eastward, where they echoed and re¬ 
echoed from bluff to bluff over the Missouri, 
and on the tepee the rain was now playing 
with the still soft voice of a summer night. 

Tubby lifted the flap of the tepee and 
looked out. “ Ugh,” he exclaimed, “ it’s as 
pitch-black dark as in a cave! If I had been 
here alone, I would have been too scared to 
eat. Listen, Mahota! A big gurgling 
noise is coming down the creek. I hear some 
wood breaking or trees falling.” 

“ Yes, I hear the noise,” replied Mahota. 
“ A big flood is coming down the creek. It 
is racing high over the place where my little 
big brother wanted to camp.” 

“ Will it come up here? ” asked Tubby 
listening intently. 

“ No flood has ever come up here,” 
Mahota assured the white boy. “ I looked 
at the roots of the rose-bushes and saw that 
they did not grow out of mud left by high 
water.” 

By this time the fire had burnt low. 
Mahota raked the red coals together, and 


VOICE FKOM THE CLOUDS 125 


placed a few dry sticks on them to light up 
the tepee. Then the lads spread out their 
robes and blankets, and to the wild roaring 
and gurgling of the creek and the still small 
voice of the rain, they soon fell asleep. 


CHAPTER XVI 


Tubby Starts a Fight 

When Tubby awoke next morning, 
Mahota and Hiram were gone, and their 
blankets were gone. Everything was gone. 
The tepee was empty. It took Tubby a few 
moments to recollect where he was, then he 
remembered: The storm, the rain, and the 
flood. He was alone in the tepee. 

Tubby was such a hard riser in the morn¬ 
ing that the two older lads had several times 
threatened that, some day, they would go off 
and leave him. 

“ They have done it,” Tubby muttered, 
getting angry, and he rushed out of the 
tepee in his red flannel shirt. 

The sun was shining brightly, but there 
was not a sign of horse or man. “ They 
have left me, sure, the big scoundrels! ” mut¬ 
tered Tubby. Then he yelled loudly, 

126 


TUBBY STARTS A FIGHT 127 


“Mahota! Hiram! Where are you? You 
never called me! ” 

At this, a roar of laughter greeted him 
from behind a thicket of bullberry-bushes. 

“ You wait, Hiram,” Tubby called; 
“ that’s your scheme. I’ll fix you! ” In his 
blind anger Tubby tried to rush straight 
through the natural hedge, but his red flannel 
shirt became firmly caught in the stout 
thorns of the bullberry-bushes. 

“ You wait! Just wait! I’ll fix you!” 
Tubby mumbled again, leaving his shirt in 
the thorn-bushes and rushing at Hiram like 
a naked Indian warrior. Hiram had been 
rolling with laughter at the sight of Tubby 
in the buffalo-bushes, and like a mad cat 
Tubby was on top of him and began to 
pound him in earnest. 

“Look out, you crazy Indian!” Hiram 
exclaimed as soon as he could compose him¬ 
self, and in a moment he knelt on Tubby’s 
chest and held his arms firmly to the ground. 
“ Mahota, take hold of his legs; we’ll throw 
him in the creek. He needs a cool bath.” 

That was Tubby’s first serious attempt to 


128 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


give his older brother a whipping. They 
did not have to throw him in the creek, be¬ 
cause he soon came to his senses without a 
cold bath. 

“ You big long-legged calf,” Hiram 
scolded him, laughing. “ What made you 
think we had left you? Couldn’t you see the 
tepee? We took everything out, because all 
the stuff was damp. Now put some clothes 
on and then hang out your blankets on the 
picket-line with ours.” 

Tubby’s body was covered with bleeding 
thorn scratches, but for these he received no 
sympathy from the older lads. Mahota 
offered to rub some of Old Dacotah’s salve 
on them, but Tubby refused testily, saying: 
“ I am not a baby. I don’t want any salve 
for a few thorn scratches.” 

When Tubby asked about breakfast, 
Hiram pointed to the sun and said: “We 
had our breakfast long ago. Mahota thinks 
this is Sunday so we are going to rest to-day 
and give our horses a rest. They are getting 
thin and sore-footed and we shall have to 
make shoes for them if we travel too hard. 


TUBBY STARTS A FIGHT 129 

“You can help yourself to some buffalo 
meat and hardtack, and there is plenty of 
good water in the creek this morning.” 

Tubby was glad that there was to be no 
travelling to-day. He had found that get¬ 
ting up before daylight every morning, 
then sitting on the back of a horse all day 
and looking out for Indians was not an easy 
life. 

When he went down to the creek for a 
drink, he was surprised to discover that the 
creek had changed its course and was run¬ 
ning a foot deep over the spot where he had 
wanted to camp. “ Well,” he thought, “ I 
would not have had a long sleep if we had 
camped here! ” 

When he had finished his breakfast he 
went for a piece of soap and had as good a 
bath as the creek afforded. The water did 
not look very clean, but it was the best to be 
found. 

Then he went to join Mahota and Hiram, 
who were taking life easy in the shade of a 
box-elder bush, for the day was getting 
warm. When he had been lying in the 


130 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


shade a while, be began to feel sleepy again, 
but the flies annoyed him. 

“ I am going back to the tepee,” he told 
Hiram. “ There are too many flies here, and 
the ants are always crawling over my face. 
I haven’t had enough sleep since we left 
Kansas; but I want you to call me for din¬ 
ner.” 

Tubby did get several hours of make-up 
sleep before he was called. 

“ Get up, little big brother,” Mahota 
urged, when dinner was ready. “ Hiram 
has made us a feast.” 

Tubby was fully awake at once. Whether 
the word “ feast ” aroused him, or whether 
he had now really had enough sleep, may be 
left undecided. 

A good cook and camp manager often 
prepares a pleasant surprise for his guests; 
and with this Sunday dinner in the Sioux 
country on the Cheyenne, Hiram set out on 
canvas cloth on the prairie not only a good 
dinner, but he had a surprise for both 
Mahota and his tall young brother. 

“ Gentlemen,” he said with mock serious- 


TUBBY STARTS A FIGHT 131 


ness, “ the dinners in the big hotels in St. 
Louis and Kansas City are served in courses. 
You two ignorant heathen have never heard 
of any courses but race-courses, but to-day 
you will learn what it means to have a dinner 
served in courses in the Blue Sky Hotel. 
Our first course consists of wild rice soup 
delicately flavored with wild onions and salt. 
Gentlemen, pass your tin cups.” 

The soup was good. Hiram had made 
the broth by boiling pieces of bacon and 
dried buffalo meat, and when the meat was 
done, he had boiled the wild rice for fifteen 
minutes in the broth. “ The soup would be 
better,” he apologized, “ if the hunters had 
provided me with a little fresh prairie 
chicken or antelope meat, but you will not 
find it bad.” 

“ It couldn’t be better,” Tubby replied. 
“ Please fill my cup again.” 

Mahota indulged his fondness for black 
coffee, sweetened with brown sugar, but the 
surprise for both Mahota and Tubby was 
the dessert. 

“ Gentlemen,” Hiram announced, “ we 


132 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


shall have dessert. Each gets a piece of 
sweet chocolate for dessert.” 

“ Sweet chocolate in the Bullberry 
Hotel!” Tubby exclaimed. “Where did 
you keep it, Hiram? ” 

“ In my pack,” Hiram replied. “ But 
any white man or Indian that I catch going 
through my pack for more will lose most of 
his scalp.” 

After dinner the lads took the horses to 
water, and then they sat around for a coun¬ 
cil, as Tubby called it. 

Mahota told of his boyhood. How his 
father taught him to track man and beast on 
the plains, and how he made him a good 
runner. He defended the position of the 
Indians at this time, and showed that the 
Government should not have sent the sol¬ 
diers under Sully and Sibley against the 
Sioux. 

“ Only one tribe,” he explained, “ the San- 
tees, were responsible for the outrages in 
Minnesota. But the white people made a 
great mistake when they did not punish Ink- 
padoota for the massacre of Spirit Lake in 


TUBBY STARTS A FIGHT 133 

Iowa. It made all the bad Indians believe 
that the whites were afraid of them. If 
many of our good people had approved of 
the war which Little Crow made on the 
whites, Little Crow would not have had to 
go alone with his son from Manitoba to steal 
horses in Minnesota, where he was killed by 
a farmer last summer. The Indians would 
have given him ponies and many warriors 
would have followed him. 

“ The Sioux do not want war now. If 
they did, their warriors would not let Gen¬ 
eral Sully come up the Missouri without of¬ 
fering him many fights, and we should have 
seen many Sioux war parties. 

“ The Yankton and Sisseton scouts with 
the half-breed scouts have kept the hostile 
young men out of the frontier for two years. 
The scout, Solomon Twostars, killed his 
own nephew, because the young man had 
taken part in the murder of some white 
people.” 

Then the talk drifted to the character of 
white men and Indians. Mahota admitted 
that the missionaries and many other white 


134 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


men were true friends of the Indians, but he 
claimed that many Indians in turn had been 
true friends of the white people. He re¬ 
minded the lads that it was the friendly In¬ 
dians who really compelled Little Crow to 
give up his three hundred white prisoners, 
and that the friendly Indians gave the mis¬ 
sionaries and their families safe conduct out 
of the region of danger. “ Some day,” he 
concluded, “ I will tell you the story of 
Waneta and his Fool Soldiers.” 

“ Tell it now,” Tubby requested. But 
Mahota replied that he had talked enough 
and had his eyes fixed on a distant cloud. 

“ Do you see anything? ” asked Tubby. 

“Yes, little big brother, I see a bird sail¬ 
ing under a cloud far off. It must be a big 
bird, for he is very far away and high up in 
the sky.” 

For some time Hiram and Tubby could 
not see the bird, because their eyes were not 
accustomed to see things sharply at great 
distances. 

When the white boys did see it, Mahota 
declared, “ It is an eagle, and I know that he 


TUBBY STARTS A FIGHT 135 

is coming toward us, because I see him get¬ 
ting bigger.” After some time the bird 
actually circled and flapped his wings within 
fifty feet above the camp. 

Tubby reached for his gun, but Mahota 
stopped him, saying, “ Only fool white men 
shoot at an eagle when they have no use for 
him. Sit still and watch him.” 

The eagle, having seen Tubby move, be¬ 
gan to climb the sky in great spirals without 
moving his wings; and a hawk arose and 
followed him screaming. The lads watched 
the strange spectacle till the eagle looked no 
bigger than a robin and till the hawk seemed 
scarcely as large as a sparrow. 

“ Why did the eagle come to our camp? ” 
asked Tubby. 

“ He saw our blankets and packs from 
far off, and he came to see what it all was. 
He wanted to know, just like people.” 

“ But why did the hawk follow him? ” 
Tubby wondered. 

“ The hawk has young somewhere on the 
ground near our camp, and he thought the 
eagle had come to carry away his young, and 


136 


THE SIOUX RUXNER 


he tried to drive him off. But the eagle did 
not come for the young hawks; he came to 
look at our camp. Perhaps our packs from 
a long way off looked like deer or antelope 
killed by hunters.” 

Toward evening Mahota and Tubby 
scouted down to the mouth of the Cheyenne. 
A white man used to keep a wood-yard at 
that place for supplying steamboats; but 
they found that the man’s cabin and wood 
had been burnt and the place was deserted. 

“ I was going to ask the man,” Mahota 
told Hiram on his return, “if he had seen 
any white miners come down the river. I 
was thinking that Old Dacotah was right 
when he said we were on a fool’s errand. 
Your brothers may pass us without our 
knowing it. But if they are wise they will 
not travel down the river in a small boat. 
They will stay at Fort Benton till this war 
is over, or they will come down on a fire- 
canoe.” 


CHAPTER XVII 

Strange Creatures 

After one more day of rest for the benefit 
of the horses, the travellers broke camp, and 
started straight north. 

“We shall never get to Fort Benton,’' 
Mahota declared, “ if we follow the Missouri 
closely. Enough rain has fallen, so there 
will be good grass for our horses, and we 
should find plenty of water anywhere. If 
we travel about a hundred miles north, we 
shall strike the Missouri again near the 
mouth of the Cannon Ball River. On our 
way we shall have to cross the Owl River and 
the Grand River. 

“We have not much meat left, and soon 
we shall have to stop a few days to hunt and 
dry meat. 

“ Bevond the mouth of the Grand, the 
Missouri turns more to the west, and there 
are such steep walls along the Little Mis¬ 
souri that horses cannot approach the river 

137 


138 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


for miles. I think before many days we 
should cross to the east side of the Big Mis¬ 
souri. I believe many Sioux are camping 
in the Bad Lands along the Little Missouri, 
and it would be foolish for us to travel 
through that country, and there is another 
reason why we should soon cross to the east 
side of the Missouri.” 

The Dakota weather was at its best as the 
lads travelled steadily northward. The day 
was warm and clear but there was nearly 
always a breeze tempering the extreme heat. 
The nights were always cool, flies were few, 
and no mosquitoes annoyed the travellers in 
the evening, even if they slept under the 
open sky, as they often did. They did not 
have enough horses to carry tepee-poles with 
any speed, and to let the horses drag them 
Indian fashion would be entirely too slow 
for the men and too tiring for the horses, 
and would leave too plain a trail. 

On most of the small creeks the timber is 
not suitable for tepee-poles, consequently 
the tepee was set up only in camps near the 
larger streams. 


STRANGE CREATURES 


139 


Toward noon the travellers were no longer 
within sight of the bluffs and the timber of 
the Missouri. “ The river makes here a bow 
to the east,” Mahota told the white boys, 
“ and we are now about twenty miles west 
of it.” 

The country was a rolling and in some 
places a broken prairie, with the usual 
patches and fringes of small timber along 
the runs and watercourses. 

Game grew more abundant than they had 
thus far found it along their route. On the 
rolling prairie, which constitutes the divide 
between the Cheyenne and the Owl River, 
they passed a herd of some five hundred 
buffaloes, the first large herd the white boys 
had ever seen. Some prong-horn antelopes 
stood or grazed within view nearly all the 
time, and the lads came within a few rods 
of whitetail deer and two bunches of elk, 
when they crossed Virgin Creek early in the 
afternoon. 

It looked toward evening as if it might 
rain again during the night, and Mahota 
rode along at a fast walk. “ There is no 


140 


THE SIOUX RUNXER 


good shelter,” he said, “ and no timber for 
tepee-poles until we reach the Owl River.” 

They crossed the river just before sunset, 
having made a little over thirty miles during 
the day. 

Although they were all tired and hungry, 
they made a good camp, dividing the work as 
they had become accustomed to do. Mahota 
set up the tepee, Hiram acted as cook and 
spread out the robes and blankets, while 
Tubby picketed the horses and provided 
wood for the night and for next morning; 
and half an hour after they had dismounted, 
Hiram called, “Wotapi!”, which is the 
Sioux word for eating. 

Mahota told Tubby that he might keep a 
small camp-fire going, for they had seen no 
sign of Indians, no tracks, and no smoke of 
camp-fires all day. 

For an hour after sunset, they sat at the 
fire and watched a storm pass to the north of 
them. There was a grand display of light¬ 
ning along the edge of the clouds, that stood 
low on the northern horizon, but as the wind 
had changed and was now blowing gently 


STRANGE CREATURES 141 

from the south and toward the storm area, 
they could not hear the thunder. “It is a 
great sight,” remarked Hiram. “I feel as 
if the Lord were passing by on the fleecy 
mountains of the clouds.” 

Mahota told them that the storm was pass¬ 
ing along the valley of the Grand River 
about thirty miles to the north. “We shall 
find the river running high to-morrow,” he 
added, “ and we may have to camp on this 
side. There is a very good game country 
among the buttes just north of the Grand, 
and we may camp there a few days to hunt 
meat, so we shall not have to stop for a hunt 
in a poorer and more dangerous country.” 

“ Good, Mahota! ” cried Tubby. “ I want 
to learn to hunt. I am going to get an an¬ 
telope when we camp on the Grand.” 

Their route on the following day led 
through country that looked much like the 
region south of the Owl River. During the 
middle of the day they passed over a stretch 
of rolling prairie, which Mahota said was 
the high land between the Owl and the 
Grand. 


142 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


As no signs of Indians were discovered, 
the lads paid more attention to the animals 
they saw along the route. They passed sev¬ 
eral prairie-dog villages, and Tubby was 
much amused at the antics of the little crea¬ 
tures. 

They sat boldly upright in front of their 
holes, or scampered out of the way of the 
riders. If a horseman came too close, the 
boldly scolding little creature would tumble 
headlong into his burrow, from which he 
would continue to scold at the intruder. 

“ I wish I could get off and catch one,” 
said Tubby. 

“You may try to catch one,” Mahota told 
him, smiling, “ after we have crossed the 
Grand.” 

In front of some of the holes sat a strange- 
looking bird, that uttered a peculiar rattling 
call. At first sight Tubby took these birds 
for an odd kind of meadow-lark, but they 
had hooked bills and claws like owls and 
hawks, and Mahota told him that they were 
the burrowing owls which live in the holes of 
badgers an‘d prairie dogs. 


STRANGE CREATURES 


143 


“ An owl living in the ground? ” asked 
Tubby. “ I never heard of that. Every¬ 
thing is getting strange in this country.” 

Near other holes, they saw the dreaded 
rattlesnakes coiled up, and several times one 
or the other of the ponies jumped and made 
a sharp turn to avoid one of the dreaded 
rattlers. 

“ What do the prairie dogs eat? ” asked 
Tubby. 

“ They eat grass,” Mahota replied. 
“ They are not dogs at all; they are a kind 
of a big, funny gopher.” 

When the horsemen had passed over some 
ten miles of rolling prairie, they came to the 
beginning of a small creek which ran north¬ 
ward toward Grand River. The creek had 
been running during the night just after the 
rain, but its bed was now marked only by 
isolated pools of mud-laden water, of which 
the horses nevertheless drank freely. 

The travellers reached Grand River late 
toward evening and found the stream run¬ 
ning high and muddy, as Mahota had pre¬ 
dicted. But having again followed some 


144 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


well-marked buffalo trails, they found a 
place where the horses could ford safely, and 
they pitched their camp on a high bank close 
to the river, within sight of several high 
buttes to the north. 

The weather had turned cool, and a small 
fire in the tepee made the camp very com¬ 
fortable and cozy, and very soon after 
supper, the lads rolled up in their blankets 
to sleep Indian fashion with their feet to¬ 
ward the fire. 

They had again travelled about thirty 
miles, and before the fire had gone out all 
three of them were sound asleep. 


CHAPTER XVIII 

Tubby Learns a Lesson 

When Tubby woke up in the morning, 
his two companions had eaten their break¬ 
fast, and had taken everything out of the 
tent for an airing. But this time Tubby was 
not deceived into thinking that they had 
moved off and left him. 

Hiram and Mahota were taking things 
easy, and, after he had eaten, Tubby joined 
them in cleaning guns and repairing saddles 
and bridles and other camp outfit. 

“ After two days of hard travel a man 
and his horses need rest,” Mahota remarked. 
“ This afternoon we must scout for game. I 
have often seen many buffaloes north and 
west of the buttes, but I see none to-day. A 
hunter can never be sure where the game is.” 

“ May I go after some antelope? ” asked 
Tubby. “ I want to learn to hunt.” 

“ Yes, little big brother,” Mahota agreed, 

145 


146 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


“ you should learn to hunt. But you must 
not shoot at everything like a fool white boy, 
and you must take careful note of your trail. 
The prairie is very big and one butte looks 
much like another and all dry creeks look 
much alike. You must also keep a sharp 
lookout for Indians, although we have seen 
no signs and tracks of them since the young 
warriors tried to rub us out.” 

Late in the afternoon Tubby mounted his 
pony and rode out northward toward the 
buttes in search of game. “ Hiram,” he 
talked bravely, “ if I don’t come back with 
some game, I will go to bed without supper.” 

He rode to the foot of the nearest butte, 
threw the reins over his horse’s head and 
climbed on foot to a high point to look over 
the prairie for game. 

About a mile to the west he saw about a 
dozen animals, which he took to be antelope. 

“ I’ll sure get one of them,” he said to 
himself. “ I’ll show Hiram that I am not 
just an overgrown kid.” 

He hurried back to his pony and his heart 
beat fast as he jumped in the saddle. He 


TUBBY LEAKNS A LESSON 147 


approached the animals carefully against 
the wind and behind a rise of ground. When 
he thought he was fairly close, he dismounted 
and again threw the reins over the pony’s 
head, although Mahota had told him not to 
do that. “ He cannot be trusted,” Mahota 
had warned him. “ You must picket him 
when you leave him.” But in his hurry and 
excitement Tubby had left the picket rope 
at the foot of the butte. 

He looked at the cap on his rifle and then 
began to crawl to the top of the ridge, but he 
soon had to stop for want of breath. “ I 
have got the buck fever,” Tubby muttered, 
angry at himself, “ but I am going to get 
one.” 

In a little while his nerves grew steady 
again. He crawled forward once more and 
from behind a rock he soon lay within easy 
reach of the game. But again he had to wait 
till his heart stopped thumping wildly. 

At the crack of his rifle one of the an¬ 
telopes jumped high in the air, but it started 
to run after the others. 

“ I have hit him! ” cried Tubby, as he 


148 


THE SIOUX RUXXER 


stood up to reload his gun, and followed 
with his eyes the animal which now began 
to lag behind the others. 

And then something happened that made 
the blood rush to Tubby’s head. A bunch 
of wild horses that had been lying down in 
a hollow jumped up and raced clattering 
over the rocky ground. They passed close to 
Tubby’s pony, which uttered a wild neigh of 
recognition, and, with head and tail raised 
and mane fluttering, galloped off with his 
wild relatives. 

Tubby forgot the antelope and ran after 
the horses, frantically calling the pony’s 
name: “ Hanky, Hanky, Hanky! ” but the 
ponies were already out of calling distance, 
and were running at great speed toward a 
broken region of small buttes, where they 
disappeared from sight. 

Tubby did not stop to think, but ran as 
fast as he could toward the spot where the 
ponies had disappeared over a ridge. When 
he reached the spot he saw the animals about 
a mile off. He was no longer able to run, 
but he followed them at a rapid walk. 



He soox lay witiiin easy reach of tiie game. — Page 11^7, 



































TUBBY LEARNS A LESSON 149 

When he had approached them within a 
quarter of a mile, they started off again, but 
in a different direction, and Tubby realized 
that they had been watching him. 

“ I’ll head them off by a short cut,” Tubby 
decided now, thinking that, if he could only 
get close up, he could catch Hanky, who or¬ 
dinarily could be approached anywhere. 

Three times more Tubby caught sight of 
the ponies, but Hanky seemed to have sud¬ 
denly turned as wild as any of his brethren. 

The last time, when Tubby had ap¬ 
proached within five hundred yards, the 
whole bunch disappeared from view down a 
dry run, and Tubby sat down with a cry of 
despair. 

He was utterly exhausted. It was get¬ 
ting dark, and he did not know how far and 
where the mad chase had led him; and he felt 
so bewildered that he did not even know in 
what direction to strike out for camp. 


CHAPTER XIX 

A Night of Terror 

Tubby sat down to rest and think. He 
tried to figure out in what direction he would 
have to travel to strike camp. He remem¬ 
bered that the buttes toward which he had 
ridden, when he started out, were north of 
the camp. Of that much he was sure. But 
what directions had he followed, before he 
crept up on the antelopes, and while he tried 
to catch his horse? 

The more he thought, the more confused 
he became. He had not even noticed the 
direction of the wind when he started out. 
A few things he had learned about the wind 
since he had been travelling with Mahota. 
When a storm was approaching, the wind 
blew toward the storm, and when the storm 
was passing the wind generally changed to 
the opposite direction. He had also learned 

that in the clear weather following a storm, 

150 


A NIGHT OF TERROR 151 

the wind nearly always blew from the west 
or northwest. 

But this knowledge did not help him in 
his present difficulty. The wind had died 
down completely, and the sky was evenly 
cloudy. He could not even tell in what 
direction the sun had set. There was just 
one thing he knew: He was north of the 
Grand River. However, he must be miles 
away from the river, for he did not remember 
that he had seen any timber or range of 
bluffs, which are the two marks of all the 
larger streams on the plains, except the Red 
River of the North. This river is indeed 
fringed by timber, but it is merely a big 
trench dug into the level plain. 

Tubby figured out that there was nothing 
he could do but wait for daylight. Then he 
would go south to the Grand, and then east 
up that river, till he struck camp. 

It had grown very dark, and Tubby 
thought he might as well lie down and try to 
go to sleep. He was both hungry and 
thirsty. “ I’ll forget about that,” he said to 
himself, “ while I am asleep.” He scraped 


152 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


away the small stones behind a big rock, used 
a flat stone for a pillow and lay down. 

He was thoroughly tired and the night 
was pleasantly warm under the mantle of 
clouds, and in a short time the great restorer 
of strength and spirit, who comes so will¬ 
ingly to youth, wrapped his tired and 
troubled body in blissful unconsciousness. 

The lad had become accustomed to sleep¬ 
ing in the open without any kind of mattress, 
bedding, or blanket, like hardened soldiers in 
a long campaign. 

He was under ordinary circumstances a 
sound sleeper, but very few people are sound 
sleepers when they are alone in a house or 
camp. Under that condition the old primi¬ 
tive instinct of watchfulness, which is dor¬ 
mant in civilized man, immediately revives. 

The sentinel sense, one might say, of ani¬ 
mals is scent, with hearing a close second; 
but man’s sentinel sense during sleep is hear¬ 
ing. Tubby woke up suddenly, startled by 
some noise. He knew that he had been 
asleep and, although he did not know what 
had awakened him, he sat up and listened 


A NIGHT OF TERROR 


153 


for sounds of danger, and with eyes, quickly 
wide awake, he tried to penetrate the dark¬ 
ness for possible forms of danger. But he 
could only make out a few scrubby gaunt 
branches of a dead cedar and a struggling 
box-elder bush close to his sleeping place. 

However, his sharp sense of hearing soon 
told him more. There was a scurrying of 
padded feet, not the clatter or tramping of 
hoofed game or horses, and before Tubby 
had time to make up his mind whether he 
had heard Indians or animals, there came the 
howling and yapping of several coyotes in 
the direction of the box-elder bush, and the 
deep almost guttural call of a big gray wolf. 
Tubby felt his hair rising on his head and 
the goose-flesh creeping up his back. In 
camp with Hiram and Mahota he had often 
laughed at the crazy howling of coyotes and 
wolves; but now they made a terrible blood¬ 
curdling noise. Perhaps the terrifying call 
did not come from coyotes and wolves at all, 
but from Sioux warriors that had seen him 
run after the horses. At this thought, 
Tubby felt the blood rushing warmly to his 


154 


THE SIOUX KUXNER 


face, and he seized his rifle instinctively and 
peered into the darkness toward the box- 
elder bush. 

For some time all was quiet, until Tubby 
wished that either man or beast would utter 
a call, for the strain of silence was worse 
than the diabolical howls, because the fright¬ 
ened lad now imagined that either Indians 
or wolves were surrounding him and 
stealthily creeping up on him. 

After some time his wish was fulfilled. A 
gray wolf not far behind the box-elder bush 
uttered its deep long hunting call of “ Oo, 

t 

oo, oooh!” that made Tubby feel as if his 
blood were freezing in his veins; and the call 
of the big beast was answered by a whole 
chorus of howling, yapping coyotes. 

This was too much for Tubby’s nerves. 
“ The big buffalo wolves are after me,” he 
thought; and he fired a ball through the bush 
in the direction of the wolf. 

Before the echo of the shot came back 
from the nearest rocks, he heard the noise 
of running feet, and it sounded as if a whole 
pack had been stealing up on him; but he 


A NIGHT OF TERROR 


155 


felt sure now that the terrifying calls had 
come from wolves and coyotes and not from 
Indians. 

“ I’ll fix those brutes,” he said to himself, 
as he went over to the dead cedar to break 
off some wood for a fire. He could have 
gathered some dry twigs from the box-elder 
bush, but he was afraid to approach it, hav¬ 
ing an uncanny feeling that a hungry wolf 
might be lying in wait for him there. 

When he was ready to light the wood, he 
discovered that he had no matches, and for a 
moment he was almost ready to cry; but 
soon it occurred to him that he might pos¬ 
sibly start a fire with his rifle. He poured a 
cartridgeful of powder into the barrel and 
rammed it down with a handful of dry 
grass, then he arranged some fine dead cedar 
twigs and needles and a quantity of dry 
grass and fired the blank shot into the moss. 
He almost gave a yell of delight when he saw 
that the dry grass wad had taken fire, and 
by covering the burning wad with more dead 
grass and fine cedar spray and waving the 
whole over his head, as the present-day boy 


156 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


scouts do in their fire-making tests, he soon 
produced the welcome red blaze. 

He could not build a big fire because he 
had very little wood, but he was no longer 
afraid; he even made bold to break both dry 
and green branches from the box-elder. He 
knew that no wolf nor other wild beast would 
attack him near a fire. 

Many times more he heard both wolves 
and coyotes howl, but they kept at a respect¬ 
ful distance and he wasted no more ammuni¬ 
tion on them. In fact he felt so little scared 
now that he nearly forgot to reload his gun. 

The night seemed interminably long, and 
finally when the wolves had been quiet for 
some time, Tubby could not resist the temp¬ 
tation to lie down. “ I am not going to 
sleep,” he resolved. “ I must start for the 
Cheyenne as soon as I can see where I am 
going.” 

When he woke up it was broad daylight. 
An Indian was sitting near his dead fire and 
it took Tubby a few seconds before he real¬ 
ized that it was Mahota. 


CHAPTER XX 
Mahota in Doubt 

“ Mahota! Is it really you? ” exclaimed 
Tubby as soon as he was able to speak. “ I 
have had an awful time.” 

Without replying to Tubby, the Sioux 
took a hardtack from the pocket of his buck¬ 
skin hunting-coat, and laid two canteens on 
the ground. 

“ Little big brother, eat and drink,” he in¬ 
vited Tubby. 

Tubby drank half of a canteen of water 
before he touched the hardtack. “ Last 
night,” he said, “ I was very hungry and 
thirsty, but now I am only thirsty. My 
head aches and my left foot is very sore.” 

When he had finishing eating and had 
drunk most of the water his headache was 
gone, but his foot, he said, was getting worse. 

When they examined the sore foot, they 

found that a sharp stone had cut through 

157 


158 THE SIOUX RUNNER 

the moccasin and made a bad gash in the 
lad’s foot. 

“ I felt it only a little bit last evening,” 
Tubby related. “I fell asleep pretty soon 
after I lay down, and when I woke up, I 
had an awful time with the wolves. They 
came right close up, and I thought they were 
going to eat me. I was too scared to feel any¬ 
thing. After I had shot at them and built 
a fire, they did not come so close.” 

“ Little big brother,” Mahota replied, 
“ your foot made a trail of blood. That is 
the reason why the wolves came so close to 
your sleeping place. When a man is 
wounded, the coyotes and wolves become 
bold.” 

Then he cleaned the wound with a little 
water from his canteen and tied up the 
wound with a bandage which he took from 
his hunting-bag. 

“ The white soldiers taught me to carry 
this always in my hunting-bag,” he ex¬ 
plained, “ and now I know that the white 
soldiers are wise in good medicine. 

“You must now ride my pony; for it is 


MAHOTA IN DOUBT 159 

bad medicine for a man to walk on a sore 
foot.” 

Mahota had of course seen at once that 
Tubby had lost his horse; and the white lad 
now told his Sioux friend just how it all 
happened. 

“ I know,” Tubby confessed, “ that I 
acted like a foolish white boy, and Hiram 
will scold me when I get to camp. 

“ But tell me, Mahota, how did you find 
me?” 

“ That was not very hard for a Sioux 
runner and trailer,” Mahota began his story. 
“We heard you shoot before it was dark, 
and we said, ‘ The little big brother has 
found game and is learning to hunt/ When 
it grew dark and you did not come home, we 
said, ‘ Little brother is lost/ We rode out 
on the prairie and fired a gun twice, but we 
heard no answer. 

“ When it grew daylight, I followed your 
trail. When I found the picket-rope, I 
knew that my brother had forgotten what I 
had told him. I followed the track of your 
pony and learned that he had run off and 


160 


THE SIOUX RUNXER 


joined the wild horses. In the sand of a 
dry run I saw your moccasin tracks, and 
then I knew that my brother was trying to 
catch a wild pony on foot. I did not look 
for your tracks any more, but followed the 
trail of the ponies. When I came close 
enough to your camp, I smelled your fire and 
I saw you asleep behind the rock.” 

Tubby was anxious to go and look for his 
pony, but he could not persuade Mahota to 
go after the runaway. 

“ It would take too much time,” Mahota 
objected, “ and we should run great risk of 
being discovered by bad Indians.” 

“ But he can’t eat with the bridle on, and 
he has the saddle on, too,” Tubby argued. 

“ He can eat in spite of the bridle,” 
Mahota replied, “ and he will soon work it 
off. If he does not lose his saddle, the first 
Indian that sees him will catch him, because 
a good saddle is worth a great deal to an In¬ 
dian. We must let him go and get along 
the best we can.” 

Tubby approached camp with a heavy 
heart, because if he had ever expected and 


MAHOTA IN DOUBT 


161 


deserved a good reproof, he felt that he de¬ 
served it now. He had not only disregarded 
the frequent warnings of the two older lads, 
but he had caused the loss of a valuable and 
much-needed horse with saddle and bridle, 
not to say anything of needlessly exposing 
himself and his companions to the danger of 
being discovered by a prowling war party. 

His spirits revived a little when Mahota 
was willing to go out of his way in order to 
pick up the antelope; but Tubby would 
gladly have forfeited any fame as a hunter 
if he could only have returned to camp on 
his own pony. 

He was much surprised when he saw 
Hiram coming on a run to meet him, and 
when he was told how it happened that 
Tubby was riding Mahota’s pony, he made 
light of the loss, saying, “ The fool critter 
was not much account, anyhow. He 
wouldn’t stand unhitched, and was always 
poor, though to be sure he had good sound 
feet and was a good traveller. We have still 
an extra horse, so let him go; let the fool 
critter go” 



162 


THE SIOUX RUXNER 


Tubby resolved that moment that he 
would earnestly try to become a good plains¬ 
man, and that he would never again talk 
saucy to his older brother and would never 
try to whip him. 

But when Hiram set out for him among 
the wild roses a real breakfast with sweet 
black coffee, Tubby had to fight down a 
choking sensation in his throat before he 
could eat a bite, although he was ravenously 
hungry. 

After he had eaten all the hardtack and 
meat which Hiram had placed before him, 
he was still hungry, but when both Mahota 
and Hiram told him that he must not eat 
any more now, he submitted quietly to their 
advice. 

Very soon he felt sleepy, and Hiram 
spread a buffalo robe for him in the tepee, 
and tucked the blankets around him. 

While Tubby was asleep, Hiram and 
Mahota talked over their plans for the fu¬ 
ture. Would it be safe for them to stay 
much longer in this camp? The hunting 
was not nearly so good as Mahota had ex- 


MAHOTA IN DOUBT 


163 


pected. The crestfallen Tubby was still 
first as hunter in this camp, for the other two 
lads had not even seen either deer, elk, or 
buffalo. 

If a roving war party found Tubby’s 
camp-fire, they would know at once that a 
white man had slept there. If they also 
found Tubby’s horse, they would almost 
surely scout down Palanata River, the Rees’ 
Own River, as the Sioux called Grand 
River. 

“ Perhaps we ought to pack up in the 
morning and get out of this camp,” Mahota 
suggested. “ The hunting in the rough 
broken country on the Ingan, the Stone 
River, which white men call Cannon Ball 
River, cannot be poorer than it is here.” 


CHAPTER XXI 

The Decoy Bundle 

In the morning it was found that Tubby 
was too sick to travel. He had a high fever 
and his foot was swollen and much inflamed. 

Mahota boiled some choke-cherry bark 
and made him drink a liberal quantity of 
this tea. “ The Indian doctors,” he told his 
friends, “ give this tea as a medicine against 
fever.” Then he chewed some bark and 
roots and tied the mixture on the wound of 
the sore foot. But for several days Tubby 
was a sick boy. He lay in the tepee with his 
sore foot raised up on a saddle, and although 
Hiram offered him fresh antelope meat, both 
boiled and roasted, Tubby had no appetite 
and ate only a little soup with hardtack in 
place of crackers. 

During all this time Mahota and Hiram 
kept a sharp lookout for Indians, but to their 

great joy the country seemed deserted. At 

164 


THE DECOY BUNDLE 


165 


the end of a week Mahota, one evening, 
climbed to the top of Elk Butte, the nearest 
butte to the camp, to look over the country 
for signs of danger. He had done this every 
day, and had always reported that he had 
seen no bad signs; but this time he returned 
with a different story. “ I saw the smoke of 
a camp,” he reported, “ about three miles to 
the west. I also saw about ten or twelve 
ponies. I should not have been sure that the 
animals were ponies,” he explained, “ be¬ 
cause they looked very small so far off. But 
one of them is white, and there is no white 
game animal in this country. The smoke 
can only come from the camp-fire of In¬ 
dians, and in this way I can tell that I have 
seen Indian ponies and that there are about 
ten or twelve men in the camp. I hope they 
are either a hunting party or a party of 
scouts who are going south to learn about 
the strength of General Sully’s army; but 
they may be young rogues that would make 
much trouble for us. 

“ The Sioux chiefs and the older warriors 
do not want war and, if they can, they will 


166 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


keep out of the way of the soldiers. The 
whites do not understand this. They think 
all the Sioux are bad, because the San tees 
committed murder in Minnesota. The 
Great Father in Washington made a bad 
mistake when he did not send soldiers after 
Inkpadoota. The good Indians would have 
helped the soldiers to capture Inkpadoota 
and they would have been glad to see him 
hanged for murdering innocent white people 
at Spirit Lake in Iowa. When Inkpadoota 
was not punished, Little Crow and his 
foolish young men thought they could also 
kill white men unpunished and drive all the 
whites out of Minnesota. They also thought 
that the Great Father had no soldiers left to 
punish them, because he is in a big war in 
the East. 

“ Now Little Crow is dead. At least, a 
Sisseton scout so told my people. He was 
killed by a farmer in Minnesota, when last 
summer he and his son had come down on 
foot from Canada to steal horses in Minne¬ 
sota. He has brought evil days upon all 
the Sioux, and now even our bravest and 


THE DECOY BUNDLE 167 

best men are afraid to travel to Mendota on 
the Minnesota River, to our friend General 
Sibley, to tell him that the Sioux want peace 
with the white men. 

“ The Great Father in Washington is so 
far away that he cannot hear the voice of 
our people. He thinks we want war and he 
sends the soldiers and the fire-canoes to our 
country.” 

Next morning Mahota aroused the white 
lads before daylight. “ My brothers,” he 
urged, “ we must now pack up and leave, be¬ 
cause our camp is no longer safe.” 

It was now that Tubby learned what was 
in the bundle which Mahota had brought 
from Old Dacotah. Mahota took from it 
buckskin leggins and hunting-skirts for both 
of his friends. “ You must now dress like 
Indians,” he told them, “ and you must not 
wear hats. Y r our hair is too light, and I 
must make it darker.” 

Before Tubby could protest Mahota had 
rubbed some antelope fat in his hair and then 
rubbed powdered charcoal from the camp¬ 
fire all over the white boy’s head. 


168 


THE SIOUX RUNXER 


“ I don’t want that grease in my hair,” 
Tubby objected. “ I am going to wash it 
out.” 

“ Little big brother,” Mahota cautioned, 
smiling at Tubby’s anger, “it is better to 
leave the grease on your hair than lose your 
scalp. My paint will not stick without the 
grease.” 

“ Tubby,” spoke up Hiram, “ don’t get us 
into any more trouble. Mahota knows what 
he is doing.” And Tubby, remembering his 
vow when Hiram did not scold him for los¬ 
ing his horse, submitted gracefully. 

“I’ll behave, Hiram,” he promised. 
“ The stuff feels awfully nasty, but maybe 
I shall get used to it.” 

The horses were now well rested and in 
fine shape, so the travellers could make good 
time, and when they stopped to eat break¬ 
fast and allow their horses to drink and feed 
they had already made about ten miles. 

Hiram and Tubby were in high spirits, 
for they were glad to be on the trail again 
and they believed that for the present they 
were not threatened by any danger. 


THE DECOY BUNDLE 


169 


Mahota, however, was silent and thought¬ 
ful. He had avoided as far as possible 
showing himself and his friends against the 
sky-line, and several times he had anxiously 
scanned their back trail from a high point 
or ridge, but this scouting he had always 
done by lying flat on his stomach. 

When the lads had finished eating, 
Mahota said he would do some scouting from 
a small butte, as the horses needed a little 
more time to feed and rest. 

In a short time Mahota returned on a run. 
“ Brothers,” he said hurriedly, “ they are 
trailing us. We must mount and ride 
away.” 

Hiram and Tubby wanted to stay and 
fight their pursuers. “ We did it once,” 
Tubby argued, “ and we can do it again.” 

“We must ride!” Mahota ordered. 
“ This time it is too dangerous to fight. 
There are too many of them. Hiram's 
wound is well healed now, but if one of us is 
killed or badly wounded we are all lost, and 
we have only one horse to spare. But our 
horses are rested and can travel faster than 


170 


THE SIOUX RUNXER 


theirs. This time, brothers, we must not 
fight but ride.” 

When, after a very few minutes, all was 
ready, Hiram was going to dismount again 
to pick up a small canvas bundle. 

“ Leave it, brother,” Mahota told him. 
“ It is a decoy bundle. They will stop to 
open it and look at everything in it and lose 
much time.” 

“ What is in it, Mahota? ” asked Tubby. 
“ I have wondered every day what you had 
in that dirty little bundle.” 

Mahota laughed as if he had suddenly for¬ 
gotten all danger. “ My white father in the 
stockade taught me that trick. There is in 
it: A pair of old shoes, a soldier’s cap, a 
small bag of white snuff powder, and two 
broken pistols, each with a loaded cartridge. 

“ They will try to find out what the white 
powder is, and they will try to make the 
broken pistols shoot; and, it may be, they 
will quarrel about the things, but they will 
be sure to lose much time.” 

The horses had now fallen into an easy 
lope, and Mahota led the way almost straight 


THE DECOY BUNDLE 171 

north, but avoided gullies and broken rocky 
places. 

“ Brothers,” he remarked after a little 
while, “ I think they have the bundle now. 
They were within two miles of our camp 
when we started. I could see the white 
horse very plainly; but now we shall gain 
two miles or more while they are trying to 
make the old pistols shoot.” 

However, if Mahota chuckled at the trick 
he had played on their pursuers, he did not 
allow the speed of his party to slacken. 
“ Their horses will soon grow tired,” he de¬ 
clared, “ but ours could go much faster for a 
short time, if necessary.” 

During the warm hours of the afternoon, 
the lads took great care not to exhaust their 
ponies; and they let them drink at every 
buffalo wallow and at every water-hole in 
the little intermittent streams which they 
crossed. 

About sunset they came to a place with 
good water and very good grass. “We 
must rest here an hour,” Mahota decided. 
“ We shall eat and let our horses eat. Tubby 


172 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


and I shall sleep, but Hiram must lie down 
behind the bushes on the high ground and 
watch our back trail, and we must not build 
a fire.” 

The ponies drank their fill and rolled on 
the ground and then fell to grazing. “ They 
are in good shape,” Mahota remarked. 
“ All our ponies rolled over completely, 
which shows that they are not stiff; and they 
are all eating, which tells us that they are 
not too tired. Now we must give them a 
good rubbing with dry grass, and then they 
can travel all night. 

“ The white soldiers taught me to give my 
pony a rubbing-down on a hard trip. The 
Indians never take care of their horses, and 
that is the reason why I think that these 
young rogues with the white horse cannot 
overtake us. They must be young rogues 
or they would not have started to follow us.” 

“ Jerusha,” Tubby remarked to Hiram, 
“ are we going to travel all night? I don’t 
know if I can keep awake that long.” 


CHAPTER XXII 

Mahota’s Strategy 

The lads were compelled to judge time 
by the sun and the stars, because neither 
Mahota nor the white boys possessed a 
watch. In this kind of woodcraft Hiram was 
easily the leader of the party. Tubby found 
it very difficult to understand that a circle 
has three hundred and sixty degrees, that a 
line from east to west through the zenith rep¬ 
resents half a circle with a hundred and 
eighty degrees, and that sun and stars move 
through fifteen degrees in one hour. 

“ I never got that far in school,” Tubby 
tried to excuse himself. “We had just 
started long division when I quit, and 
things about circles and degrees were in the 
back of the book.” 

“ You don’t have to learn everything from 

books,” Hiram scolded him. “ You can 

learn this better here on the plains, if you 

173 


174 


THE SIOUX RUXNER 


will just use your e5 r es and your head and 
quit acting like a big brainless grasshop¬ 
per. 

When Hiram knew that an hour had 
passed, he saddled the horses and had every¬ 
thing ready to move before he called Mahota 
and Tubby, both of whom he found sound 
asleep in their blankets. 

Mahota told his friends that he intended to 
travel all night if the ponies did not give 
out. The sky was almost clear, with the 
moon nearly full. “It is a good night for 
us,” Mahota remarked, “ but it is impossible 
to trail anybody at night, unless one is sure 
where the pursued party is going. These 
rogues with the white horse do not know 
what direction we will take after dark, so 
they will have to camp till daylight when 
they can see our tracks again.” 

About two hours after their start, the 
travellers crossed the Cannon Ball River, 
and at midnight they stopped again for an 
hour, and at this time Hiram and Tubby 
were asked to roll up in their blankets for a 
short sleep. The horses held out well, and 


MAHOTA’S STRATEGY 


175 


about an hour after sunrise the party 
crossed Heart River, which joins the Mis¬ 
souri opposite the present city of Bismarck 
in North Dakota. 

At this place they rested again for a short 
time before they started once more straight 
north. About noon they crossed a small 
stream now called Square Butte Creek. 
Thus far the horses acted as if they knew 
why their riders made such unusual demands 
on them, but now they began to lag. 

“ We are not going to use the whip on 
them,” Hiram told his companions. “ Let 
us find a good camp and call it a trip.” 

Mahota agreed to the plan and headed for 
a patch of timber toward the east. “ This 
is a good place to make a brave stand if we 
have to,” Mahota decided, when they reached 
the timber. “We are within rifle-shot of 
the Missouri, and I see buffaloes to the 
north. Here we camp, brothers, and set 
up our tepee. I think we have travelled 
about a hundred miles since we left Grand 
River.” 

The place proved to be an ideal camp. A 


176 


THE SIOUX RUXNER 


shallow pool furnished good water for the 
horses, and a few rods down the slope a little 
spring trickled out of the ground. 

“ Little big brother,” Mahota told Tubby, 
when the tepee was up and the horses were 
picketed, “ you must now watch the camp, 
while big brother and I roll up in our 
blankets. Hiram must watch to-night, and 
I shall go to do some scouting after the moon 
comes up. If you go to sleep, little big 
brother, Hiram shall whip you with a willow 
switch when he wakes up. If you feel 
sleepy, you must walk around; for if you 
lie down, you will go to sleep.” 

Tubby did have a hard time to keep 
awake; but he walked around, turned a few 
somersaults and climbed a bushy cotton¬ 
wood-tree. He discovered no signs of hu¬ 
man beings, but to the north he could just 
make out a large herd of buffaloes. 

When the sun stood low in the west, 
Hiram and Mahota woke without being 
called. 

“ Brothers, let us build a fire and make a 
feast,” Mahota suggested. “We are all 


MAHOTA’S STRATEGY 


177 


hungry, for we have not eaten much since 
we left Grand River.” 

After supper Mahota told his friends to 
dig three holes. “We must dig them in the 
brush,” he said, “ but so close to the open 
that we can see the prairie around our camp, 
and then we must examine our guns. 
Now,” he added when the work was done, 
“ we have rifle-pits like white soldiers, and 
we can send much bad medicine over the 
prairie.” 

Just as the moon was coming up, Mahota 
put two hardtacks and a little dried antelope 
meat in his hunting-bag, strapped on his 
belt with hunting-knife and pistol, and told 
his friends that he was going to scout over 
their back trail. This made both Hiram 
and Tubby very anxious for him. 

“ My big brother,” Mahota said to Hiram, 
“ you must stay awake, but Tubby may go 
to sleep in the tepee. I shall not take my 
rifle, because I cannot run fast enough with 
it. I may not be back before the sun tells 
you that it is noon. But I shall not get lost, 
because I know this country very well, and 


178 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


you need not be afraid, because you are in a 
very strong camp.” 

“ I wish I could run like that,” said 
Tubby, when Mahota disappeared over the 
nearest rise to the south; and then Tubby 
went into the tepee leaving the camp to the 
exclusive care of Hiram. 

The night wore away very slowly for the 
lone guard. Wolves and coyotes howled as 
usual, but they all hung around the buffaloes 
and none came close to the camp. At day¬ 
light Hiram ate a little breakfast and then 
called Tubby to do guard duty, while him¬ 
self sought his blankets in the tepee. 

About the middle of the forenoon Mahota 
returned. “ Hiram, get up! ” Tubby called, 
when he saw him coming. “ Mahota has got 
some news for us.” 

Mahota did have much news. “ Brothers,” 
he began, “‘ it was well that I made a run 
over our back trail. These men are young 
rogues, but they are good trailers. They 
did stick right to our trail, because they knew 
from our tracks that there were white men 
in our party. 


MAHOTA’S STKATEGY 


179 


“ I found their camp just when I was 
ready to turn back. About twenty-five 
miles south of this place they had made a 
brush shelter and lain down to sleep. Their 
horses, thirteen of them, were all staked out, 
and nobody was watching, so I played a 
trick on them. I could have stolen all their 
horses, but it would not have been wise to 
do that, and so I only played a good trick 
on the men. They are not following our 
trail now.” 

“ What did you do to them? ” Tubby 
asked. “ Tell us please.” 

“ I set them on foot,” Mahota replied 
laughing; “ they are walking now. I cut the 
rope of every one of their ponies and started 
the ponies on the back trail. A pony always 
wants to go back home, and when the men 
woke up the ponies must have travelled 
many miles south. 

“ I know they talked much bad Sioux 
when they woke up, and they were very 
angry. I could have stolen all their horses 
as easily as my father took the horses of the 
Pawnees, but I knew if I drd so they would 


180 THE SIOUX RUNXER 

follow us on foot and then we would have 
had a big fight with them. 

“ Now I know that they are running after 
their horses away from us. I wanted very 
much to hide myself and see them run, but I 
was afraid you would think I was lost or 
killed. 

“ And now I am very hungry, brothers. 
Please give me some food and make me 
plenty of sweet black soup.” 


CHAPTER XXIII 

The Hunting-Camp 

“ Brothers,, we must now make a hunt for 
meat,” Mahota told his friends, when he 
returned from a short scouting trip around 
the camp. “ To-day I am tired and must 
sleep and rest after my long run, but to¬ 
morrow we shall make a big hunt.” 

When they were getting ready next day, 
Tubby asked if he might cut up a few bullets 
for fine chicken shot. “ The country is full 
of prairie chickens,” he added, “ and I think 
stewed chicken and chicken soup would taste 
very good for a change.” 

“ Little big brother,” Mahota replied, 
“ you may cut up two bullets with your 
hatchet and fire four shots at prairie 
chickens. Ammunition costs so much here 
that we cannot afford to waste it on small 
game. We must hunt buffalo, and as soon 
as we have dried and smoked the meat, we 

should cross to the east side of the Missouri. 

181 


182 


THE SIOUX RUNXER 


“ The country east of the river has better 
grass; and I think we shall meet fewer In¬ 
dians there, and we must avoid the Bad 
Lands on the Little Missouri. They are a 
bad rough country for travelling, and I think 
some big Sioux camps are there, and the 
warriors will make a stand there against 
the soldiers of General Sully. 

“If we fall in with a big Sioux camp, I 
fear some young warriors, who have not 
yet earned the right to wear an eagle feather, 
will kill you or will make you prisoners.” 

“ But, Mahota, we can’t swim,” objected 
Tubby. “ The creek on our farm in Kan¬ 
sas was not deep enough for swimming.” 

“ I think, little brother,” Mahota replied, 
“ your ponies would carry you across, but if 
they became scared, you might fall off and 
be drowned in the swift current. To make 
sure that you do not drown we shall make a 
bull-boat. That will carry us safely across, 
if we are careful with it.” 

“ Why can’t we make a bark canoe? ” 
asked Tubby. 

“ If we were travelling in the country of 


THE HUNTING-CAMP 


183 


the enemies of the Sioux, the Chippewas, we 
would use a birch-bark canoe,” explained 
Mahota, “ but the white-birch trees of the 
Chippewa country do not grow on the Mis¬ 
souri. The only tree that grows big here is 
the cottonwood, and its bark is too brittle for 
a canoe. 

“ Sometimes the Sioux hollow out a big 
tree, or they make a raft of logs, but gener¬ 
ally they cross the Missouri and the Yellow¬ 
stone in bull-boats. The warriors often 
swim across on their horses, but their robes 
and blankets and the women and children 
they take across in bull-boats.” 

Tubby wanted to know what a bull-boat 
was like, but Mahota only answered, “ You 
will see it, little brother, when we make one.” 

When all was ready the three men slowly 
approached, against the wind, a large herd of 
buffaloes that was grazing about a mile north 
of camp. 

When they had approached within a quar¬ 
ter of a mile, Mahota stopped. 

“ Brothers,” he exclaimed, “ we must dis¬ 
mount now. One of you must hold the 


184 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


horses, and one can go with me on foot. We 
do not wish to scare the herd and stampede 
them, because we want only two fat cows. 
We cannot use the meat of more than two 
animals, and we need only one skin for our 
bull-boat. Bad foolish white men kill many 
buffaloes and leave them for the wolves. 

“ Our fathers have taught us that it is 
wrong to kill more animals than we can 
use.” 

Mahota and Tubby approached the herd 
carefully behind a clump of snowberry 
bushes. Mahota quickly picked out two fat 
cows not accompanied by calves and told 
Tubby to aim low at the shoulder. The two 
cows dropped dead at the shot of the hunters, 
and Tubby was surprised that the animals 
close by did not at once rush away. 

“ When buffaloes do not see the hunter, 
they often pay no attention to the noise of a 
gun,” explained Mahota. But when the 
two hunters rose up and gave a wild Sioux 
war whoop, the nearest bunch of the herd 
galloped away. 

“ I thought hunting buffaloes was real 


THE HUNTING-CAMP 


185 


wild sport,’’ Tubby expressed his surprise. 
“ I think this was tame hunting.” 

It is wild and dangerous sport,” Mahota 
replied, “ when the Indians make a surround 
or when they run buffaloes on horseback; 
but why should we stampede the whole herd, 
when we can use only two animals? Many 
white men, who call themselves hunters, are 
nothing but brutal killers and butchers. 
Our wise men say it will not be many years 
before the buffaloes are all gone, because 
both whites and Indians now kill thousands 
of them for their hides alone, leaving the 
meat for the wolves.” 

Then Mahota motioned to Hiram to bring 
fhe horses and when the horses were brought 
and picketed he told his companions that 
they should now learn to dress the buffaloes 
and to cut up the meat. 

The smallest and fattest buffalo the hunt¬ 
ers set up in such a way that the legs were 
bent under the animal and that its back was 
up. Then Mahota slit the skin along the 
back, and very soon a flap of clean skin, 
hair-side down, was laid on the grass on each 


186 THE SIOUX RUNNER 

side of the animal. Then Mahota showed 
the lads how to cut off quickly all the meat, 
and laid it on the clean skin. 

Along each side of the back a buffalo in 
good condition has a long thin strip of fat. 
These two strips, called depoyer by the 
Western hunters and trappers, Mahota 
trimmed off with great care. “ After these 
strips are dried and smoked,” he explained, 
“ they are very good eating, better than 
white men’s bread or the soldiers’ hardtack.” 

The second buffalo they skinned and 
dressed in the way that the white boys had 
learned to dress beeves on the farm. They 
cut the skin open on the under side and 
along the legs, and freed the skin entirely 
from the carcass. “ Out of this large skin 
we are going to make a bull-boat,” Mahota 
said. 

In a very short time, the three hunters had 
tied up the meat in the skins, loaded it on 
the horses and were back in camp. 

But there was much more work to be done. 
Long poles were laid on forked stakes, and 
frames were made of smaller poles. Then 


THE HUNTING-CAMP 


187 


they cut all the meat in thin strips and hung 
some of them over the poles to dry in the sun, 
while others they spread out on the frames, 
under which they kept a slow fire going till 
evening, when Mahota declared it was dried 
and well done and could be tied up in can¬ 
vas or buckskin. 

In the evening the lads made a feast of 
fresh buffalo meat both boiled and broiled, 
and both white lads declared that it was the 
best meat they ever ate. 

After the sun went down, there soon rose 
again a great noise of howling wolves and 
coyotes. “ They are finishing the buf¬ 
faloes,” remarked Mahota. “ To-morrow 
nothing will be left of them but the bones. 
The magpies and the crows and the ravens 
had their feast this afternoon.” 


CHAPTER XXIV 
The Bull-Boat 

Mahota had taken good care that during 
the night some sneaking coyotes would not 
spoil the buffalo hide or steal some of their 
meat. 

“It is not very likely,” he told his white 
brothers, “ that they will trouble us to-night, 
because they have two buffalo carcasses to 
finish; but on their way to the feast they 
might fall upon our meat and hide. We 
must therefore hang the hide over a high 
pole and pile the meat up in the tepee.” 

Tubby was not much pleased when at day¬ 
break Hiram nudged him, saying: “ Wake 
up, Tubby, wake up! Mahota has already 
watered and picketed the horses and break¬ 
fast is ready. Fried buffalo liver and fresh 
tripe!” 

“ Oh, let me alone,” Tubby drawled sleep¬ 
ily. “ I don’t want any breakfast.” 

188 


THE BULL-BOAT 


189 


“ You get up and eat liver,” Hiram or¬ 
dered, throwing a pile of blankets and robes 
over Tubby’s face and sitting down hard on 
the pile, so that the choking lad was at once 
wide awake and glad to crawl out. 

“You are always rough when you wake 
me up,” he complained. “ Why can’t you 
call me decent? Some day, when I wake up 
first, I’ll fix you.” 

“Yes, you have leave to fix me,” Hiram 
replied laughing. “ I am not afraid of you 
ever waking up first on this trip.” 

“ Well, if I do I shall pour a pail of water 
over your head,” Tubby declared, not yet in 
his ordinary good humor. 

After breakfast Mahota and the white 
lads went down the spring run to a grove of 
young ash-trees, where he cut an armful of 
long smooth poles. 

“ We need two long ones,” he said, “ for a 
big hoop. It must be a hoop that large,” 
he added, holding his hands about five feet 
apart. “ Then we want five poles to run up 
and down for the sides, and three smaller 
hoops for the inside.” 


190 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


It was not until Mahota began to shape 
and bend the poles at the camp that his white 
companions could form an idea as to what 
Mahota was going to do with so many 
poles. 

“ These are fine poles,” Mahota remarked, 
as he spliced two of them for the upper rim, 
which a canoeist would call the gunwale. 
Then he laid the hoop on the ground, bent 
two long poles so that each made nearly a 
semicircle. The ends of the two hoops he 
pushed into the ground, and Hiram lent a 
hand to hold them in position, while Mahota 
tied them to the rim hoop. Very soon 
Mahota had built a frame of poles, which in 
its present position looked as if it might be 
intended for a small playhouse. Each hoop 
Mahota had made of two pieces spliced to¬ 
gether, but each rib consisted of one bent 
pole. In a short time the lads saw before 
them the frame of a big basket, in which ribs 
and hoops crossed every eight to ten inches. 

“ Now,” said Mahota, “ we shall soon have 
a boat.” 

“ I don’t see,” remarked Tubby, “ how we 


THE BULL-BOAT 


191 


can tie on the hide without punching it full 
of holes/’ 

Before the hide was put on, the lads set 
the frame basket upside down, on two logs; 
and now began the last operation. 

Mahota directed the white boys to help 
him stretch the green hide, with the hairy 
side out, evenly over the frame. He forced 
a flap of skin over each of about fifteen pro¬ 
jecting knobs of the long and short ribs and 
tied the flaps all carefully in place. Then 
he punched many holes in the skin near the 
edge and tied it carefully to the rim hoop all 
the way around. Any flaps of skin that pro¬ 
jected too far above the rim, he quickly cut 
away. 

“ There is our bull-boat,” he called, as he 
turned it right side up. “ It is not much of a 
trick to build one.” 

“ No, it isn’t,” Hiram agreed, 44 if you 
know how to do it.” 

“ It will not be tight and safe,” Tubby 
claimed, 44 if we don’t tie the skin to the other 
hoops and the ribs lower down.” 

44 Little brother,” Mahota replied, 44 the 


192 


THE SIOUX RUXNER 


sun will make it tight and safe. We must 
now place it where the sun can strike the in¬ 
side, and you will see what happens. The 
skin of a bull-boat can be tied only to the 
ends of the ribs and to the rim. If you 
wanted to tie it in other places, you would 
have to cut holes through the skin, and that 
would ruin the boat, for the holes would be¬ 
come larger as the skin shrinks in drying.” 

Two days in the sun ahnost completely 
dried the skin, and caused it to shrink so 
much that it made a rigid, tight-fitting cover 
over the frame of poles. The ribs and hoops 
were not over an inch and a quarter in di¬ 
ameter and Mahota said the whole boat 
would not weigh over twenty-five or thirty 
pounds when both skin and frame were 
thoroughly dry. 

“ I shall be afraid to ride in it,” Tubby 
admitted. “ It is only two feet deep.” 

“ Little brother,” Mahota replied, “ that 
boat will hold all three of us at once. A 
smaller boat can be made of the hide of an 
elk, and sometimes the Indians make a big 
boat by sewing several skins together, but 


THE BULL-BOAT 


193 


the quickest way is to make a boat out of one 
skin of the Indian buffalo or of a big spotted 
buffalo of the white people. 

“ You see, brothers,” he explained fur¬ 
ther, “ I have used only poles of young ash- 
trees. If there are no ash-trees where an 
Indian wants to make a bull-boat, he uses 
cottonwood or willow, or any kind of poles 
he can find. But the ash poles are toughest; 
they do not break when the green hide 
shrinks and becomes hard in drying.” 

On the appointed morning the packs and 
meat were loaded on the horses. Tubby 
took care of the animals, while Hiram and 
Mahota carried the bull-boat, which for con¬ 
venience they had tied, upside down, to two 
poles. 

Arrived at the river, they placed about a 
hundred pounds of dried meat in the boat, 
Mahota and Tubby carefully entered the 
strange craft, Hiram urged the horses into 
the river, Mahota and Tubby plied their 
short paddles, and off went the bull-boat, 
spinning around again and again till Mahota 
got it out of the swift current and headed it 


194 THE SIOUX RUNNER 

on a slanting course toward the eastern 
shore. 

The horses were all accustomed to swim 
streams, and followed the lead of Mahota’s 
pony without trouble. 

To say that Tubby was scared is no ex¬ 
aggeration. When the big tub, as he had 
called it, began to spin around in the muddy 
current, he was so scared that he looked pale 
and almost forgot to breathe. “ Did you 
ever see such a crazy thing,” he thought, 
“ that has neither stern nor bow? I’ll get 
dizzy and fall out.” But when Mahota, 
pulling hard ahead with his short paddle, had 
steadied the whirling craft, and when Tubby 
saw that the big skin tub was otherwise very 
steady, he recovered his wits enough to as¬ 
sist Mahota in steering the bull-boat clear 
of several dangerous snags, which are always 
numerous in the Missouri. 

In a short time they landed gently on a 
sandbar a quarter of a mile farther down¬ 
stream than they had started. 

When Mahota had quickly placed the 
meat on the sandbar, he said to Tubby, 


THE BULL-BOAT 


195 


“ Now little brother, help me carry the boat 
up-stream half a mile, so I can strike the 
place where our big brother is waiting, be¬ 
cause a bull-boat cannot be made to run 
straight across a river.” 

“ Can’t I go back with you? ” asked 
Tubby. “I’m not afraid of a bull-boat any 
more.” 

“ No, little brother,” Mahota told him, 
“ you must watch the horses to see that they 
do not straggle away, while Hiram and I 
ferry our other things across the big river.” 


i 


CHAPTER XXV 

Tubby’s Exploit 

Tubby liked the country east of the river 
so well that he wished very much to make 
camp and stay several days. 

“ I have just had a fine swim out on the 
sandbar,” he declared. “ Now I want to go 
and look for chickens. You know I have 
not used that fine shot I made.” 

But Mahota would not listen to Tubbv’s 

•/ 

plan. He pointed out that the horses had 
enjoyed plenty of rest and that it was a long 
way from the next stopping-place at Fort 
Union, on the north bank of the Missouri, 
about two miles above the mouth of the 
Yellowstone. “ Two miles on horseback,” 
he added, “ but four miles if you go in a boat 
on the crooked river. We must go on and 
make a day’s journey, before we camp. 

“ How far is it to Fort Union, you wish 
to know, little brother? It is two hundred 
miles.” 


196 


TUBBY’S EXPLOIT 


197 


“ You mean by the crooked river? ” 
Tubby suggested. 

“ No, it is two hundred miles, and perhaps 
more, by land,” Mahota insisted. 

“ Jerusha! ” exclaimed the lad, “ this 
country is big, and it seems to be getting 
bigger the farther we get into it.” 

“ Yes, little brother,” Mahota agreed, 
“ the Sioux live in a big country, and they 
are a powerful nation among the Indians.” 

All day the lads travelled over the rolling 
prairie, which was now in its summer beauty 
of green grass and many hardy flowers. 
Mahota kept far enough from the river to 
avoid the bluffs of the small streams; nor did 
he seem to fear falling in with hostile In¬ 
dians, for he cut straight across the plains, 
where a horseman can be seen for miles, and 
Tubby and ITiram learned what it meant 

when the leader uses onlv one word of com- 

•/ 

mand all day long: “ Travel, travel! ” 

On the third evening they camped in a 
swale on a little sluggish stream with no 
wood in sight but a few bushes of willow. 
When Tubby complained that he could not 


198 


THE SIOUX RUXXER 


find any wood for the camp-fire, Mahota 
pointed to the dry buffalo chips that dotted 
the prairie in thousands. 

“ Gather a lot of them,” he told the boy; 
“ they make a good hot fire when they are 
dry. If you have time you may shoot us 
some prairie chickens. To-morrow is Sun¬ 
day, and we shall not travel.” 

Hiram found that dry buffalo chips made 
a very good “ Indian fire,” as Mahota called 
it. “ No flame and very little smoke to the 
fire,” he told them. 

Buffalo chips are the dried droppings of 
the buffaloes, and consist of the finely 
chewed woody fibers of grass, which the ani¬ 
mals cannot digest. They resemble dry 
peat, and burn much like peat, but with less 
smoke. The dry droppings of domestic 
cattle, spotted buffaloes, as the Indians used 
to call them, have the same quality, and white 
settlers on the treeless plain have often used 
them as fuel. 

Tubby soon came to camp with a dozen 
prairie chickens. “ I think I saw a hundred 
of them,” he related. It is no fun hunting 


TUBBY’S EXPLOIT 199 

them. They just sit still and let you shoot 
at them if you don’t chase them up.” 

“ Why do white men kill birds and ani¬ 
mals and call it fun? ” asked Mahota. “ In¬ 
dians do not kill game for fun; they kill 
game when they are hungry or need robes or 
skins for their clothing and tepees.” 

When the talk drifted to the miners in 
Idaho, Mahota said he had been thinking of 
them, every day. 

“We need not watch the river for them,” 
he continued. “ They will dig for the 
yellow metal in the mountains all summer. 
The Indians say that no white ever gets 
enough of the yellow metal, which many In¬ 
dians have never seen. I do not think we 
shall meet your brothers at Fort Union. I 
think, maybe, they will come to Fort Ben¬ 
ton just in time to come down the Missouri 
before it freezes up, but if they are wise, they 
will come in time to go home on a fire-canoe. 
But we shall ask for them at Fort Union. 
Many Indians come to that place, and the 
white traders buy there many buffalo robes, 
smoked tongues, and many beaver skins 


200 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


from the rivers in the Shining Mountains. 
I have been there only once, when I was a 
small boy, but it is the biggest fort of the 
white traders in the Indian country.” 

Sunday was one of those serene perfect 
days, which in a good season one may ex¬ 
perience on the Western plains, on the old- 
time wild prairie, in the Bad Lands and the 
Black Hills. 

A strange vigorous perfume of many 
resinous plants floated on the breeze, and 
songs of meadow-larks, buntings, and native 
sparrows filled the air, although the singers 
no longer uttered their tunes with the pas¬ 
sion of early June. 

The Sunday dinner was a real feast of 
•/ 

chicken and chicken soup, Hiram, unknown 
to his friends, having smuggled a little rice 
along on the trip. 

But the day was not to pass without some 
excitement. Late in the afternoon Tubby 
asked if he might ride down the swale for a 
mile or so just to look at the country and 
the wild things, and Mahota allowed him to 
go. 


TUBBY’S EXPLOIT 


201 


Half an hour later Hiram and Mahota 
heard him yelling at the top of his voice. 
They sprang to their guns and rushed to 
meet him, thinking that a Sioux war party 
was after him. 

“ Catch them! Head them off! ” Tubby 
was yelling. “ Catch them, Mahota! Head 
them off, Hiram! ” 

Two fine horses, a black and a roan, came 
racing up the swale with Tubby in close pur¬ 
suit. The two strange horses nearly stam¬ 
peded all the ponies of the camp, but they 
seemed glad to meet friends, and with a 
little careful work the white lads caught both 
of them, but of Mahota they were afraid. 

“ Mahota, what does it mean? ” asked 
Hiram. 

“ They are good American horses,” the 
Sioux asserted. “ General Sully’s or Gen¬ 
eral Sibley’s soldiers must have lost them 
here last summer, and they must have stayed 
in the timber near the river all winter. If 
they had ever been chased by Indians, you 
could not have caught them.” 

Tubby gave the black to Mahota, and, 


202 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


“ Hiram, you get the roan,” he decided, “ be¬ 
cause you did not scold me when I lost my 
pony.” 

Mahota was much pleased with the gift, 
but the next day he called Tubby aside to 
tell him of an Indian ruse. “ Little big 
brother,” he spoke kindly, “ you brought us 
two good horses, but you must not try to 
bring any more horses to our camp. When 
you see one or two horses grazing on the 
prairie you must not approach. Nearly 
always an Indian is lying in the grass or 
bushes near by. He is waiting to take your 
scalp, and the horse is a decoy to make you 
come.” 



“Catch them, Mahota! Head them off, Hiram!”—• Page 201 

































: _ 









CHAPTER XXVI 
The Great Sickness 

During the next few days, the white lads 
noticed that Mahota chose a route far east 
of the Missouri. They also noticed that he 
was unusually watchful and silent. 

“ Hiram, I think Mahota is homesick, or 
he is lost,” Tubby confided to his brother. 
“ What is he always riding ahead for? We 
have not seen a sign of Indians for many 
days, and he says we are no longer in the 
Sioux country. I am afraid he does not 
know this country and we are lost. I should 
not be surprised if we are in Canada and 
shall never find Fort Union.” 

Hiram did not believe that they were lost, 
but he admitted that Mahota acted as if 
something worried him, or as if he was on the 
lookout for some danger. 

One evening after supper, when Mahota 

had put out the small camp-fire by covering 

203 


204 THE SIOUX EUXNER 

it with earth, Tubby could no longer hide his 
anxiety. 

“ Mahota,” he asked, “ why did you put 
out the camp-fire and why do you nearly al¬ 
ways ride ahead and scout? There are no 
Indians in this country.” 

“ My brothers,” Mahota replied seriously, 
“ there are many things that white men do 
not know about the great plains of the buf¬ 
faloes and the Indians. I am not scouting 
these days for Sioux war parties, but other 
Indians often hunt in this region. The As- 
siniboins came here from Canada, and the 
Mandans, Arikaras, and Gros Ventres come 
from their villages near Fort Berthold. 
The Sioux have waged war against all these 
tribes, as long as our oldest men remember. 

“ The Mandans and Arikaras live in 
houses built of earth and poles, and they 
raise much corn and beans and squash. The 
wise men among the Mandans and Arikaras 
and Gros Ventres would like to make peace 
with the Sioux, but the peace never lasts, 
because all the men now living have grown 
up in war. 


THE GREAT SICKNESS 


205 


“ Sometimes these three tribes make up 

war parties that come down the Missouri in 

bull-boats, and when they have surprised and 

killed some of our people they leave the bull- 

boats and march home on foot. Thev hide 

•> 

while the sun is shining and travel during the 
hours of darkness, so it is difficult for our 
warriors to find them. A long time ago 
these tribes had many warriors, but about 
thirty years ago a great sickness broke out 
among the Indians of the plains, a sickness 
which is much worse among the Indians than 
among the white men. 

“ My father told me that ten thousand In¬ 
dians died of it. A fire-canoe brought it up 
the Missouri River, and it went through all 
the tribes of the plains except the Cheyennes. 
The Cheyennes, at that time, had a big white 
friend, who lived in a big adobe fort on the 
Arkansas River. His name was William 
Bent and his wife was a Cheyenne woman. 
When the white chief took the great sickness, 
he sent runners to the Cheyennes and warned 
them not to come to his fort to trade, so the 
plague might not fall upon them. The 



206 


THE SIOUX RUXXER 


Cheyennes believed their white friend and 
did not leave their hunting-grounds and none 
of them died. 

“ The other tribes had no big white friend 
and they did not heed the warning of the 
traders. They bought goods that had been 
on the fire-canoe, and the great sickness came 
to all of them. 

“ The sickness was worst among the Man- 
dans. Nearly all of them died; not enough 
were left to bury the dead. Since that time 
the Mandans have not enough men to defend 
themselves against the Sioux, and so they 
live with the Arikaras and Gros Ventres near 
Fort Berthold. 

“ The Sioux call this sickness by a very 
long name, but it is what white people call 
smallpox. The white doctors make a little 
wound in a man’s arm, and put a little sick¬ 
ness into it, and then the man does not get 
the big sickness, but I have forgotten the 
name of the medicine.” 

“ Vaccination? ” Hiram suggested. 

“ Yes, that is it. They give him vaccina¬ 
tion and then he does not take the smallpox, 


THE GREAT SICKNESS 207 

which is a white man’s sickness. Our medi¬ 
cine men had no vaccination, and there were 
no white doctors in the Indian country. 

“Now I have told you about the great 
sickness and I have told you the reason why 
we travelled so far east of the river. I am 
scouting ahead these days, because I fear 
that we might fall in with a big hunting 
party of the Assiniboins or of the three 
tribes who might try to kill us all because I 
am a Sioux.” 

“ But we are not lost and are not in Can¬ 
ada? ” Tubby blurted out. 

“ No, little brother,” Mahota answered, a 
little surprised. “ How could we get lost? 
I have never been in this region, but my 
father has often told me about it. A Sioux 
runner cannot get lost on the prairie. We 
are now about thirty miles from Fort Ber- 
thold on the Missouri, and the mouth of the 
Little Missouri is the same distance in the 
direction of the afternoon sun; but to reach 
Canada we should have to travel seventy 
miles toward the star that never moves. 

“ Little brother, you know that white offi- 


208 


THE SIOUX RUXXER 


cers make maps of the land and the rivers 
and carry the maps in their knapsacks. An 
Indian runner also makes a map of rivers 
and trails, of plains and buttes and of moun¬ 
tains and of many other things; but he 
carries the map in his head, where he can 
always see it, even if the sun is not shining 
and when there is no light from a camp-fire. 

“ I should also tell you that the three tribes 
are friendly to the whites, so you need not 
be much afraid if we meet their men; but we 
should not go into one of their big camps.” 

The rest of the trip was interesting enough 
and hard enough. Tubby’s horse stepped 
into a hidden badger-tunnel and pitched his 
rider and badly bruised Tubby’s left arm, 
so that he had to carry it in a sling for several 
days. 

The lads met a small party of friendly 
Mandan hunters for whom they made a 
feast, and who invited Tubby to go on a 
buffalo hunt with them, but Hiram and 
Mahota would not consent to the plan. 

The last week of July, two weeks after 
they had crossed the Missouri, they rode 


THE GREAT SICKNESS 


209 


safely into Fort Union, the most important 
fort of the American Fur Company on the 
Missouri and in the whole western Indian 
country, two miles by trail above the mouth 
of the Yellowstone and on the north side of 
the Missouri, and by river four miles above 
the mouth of the Yellowstone. 


I 


CHAPTER XXVII 
Fort Union 

Fort Union looked to Tubby as big as a 
small town. It resembled somewhat the fort 
of Old Dacotah. It was entirely enclosed 
by a stockade of cottonwood logs set in the 
ground; but it was much bigger than Old 
Dacotah’s fort, measuring 220 by 240 feet, 
and it had a stone blockhouse or bastion on 
each of two corners. 

The post was owned by the American Fur 
Company in which Pierre Chouteau, Jr., of 
St. Louis was the controlling spirit. Its 
manager, or factor, in 1864 was Charles Lar- 
penteur, who has left in his book, “ Forty 
Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Mis¬ 
souri,” one of the best accounts of those hard 
and stirring days. 

Had Mahota and his two white friends 
arrived at Fort Union about thirty years 

earlier, in the days when the great Kenneth 

210 


FORT UNION 


211 


McKenzie ruled at Fort Union, they might 
have had a good time. In those days the 
Western Indians were not yet pressed by 
white settlers, and many famous men visited 
this outpost of civilization in the wilderness. 
Among them was George Catlin, who has 
left us a large number of fine paintings of 
Indians. A German prince, Maximilian 
von Wied, spent much time at the fort, and 
he also has left an account of his visit on the 
Missouri with many fine pictures, among 
them a picture of Fort Union with the land¬ 
scape around it. 

But the most famous visitor to Fort 
Union was John James Audubon, who spent 
two months at and near Fort Union in the 
summer of 1843. In a room in the upper 
story of the big house of the factor, Aubu- 
bon drew and painted some of the fine pic¬ 
tures of birds, animals, and plants, which 
the Indian chiefs and warriors of those days 
admired as much as we admire them to¬ 
day. 

During the summer season especially, 
Fort Union was a lively place. Steamboats 


212 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


from St. Louis brought their cargoes of In¬ 
dian goods. Some of the boats went on up 
the river to Fort Benton, the head of steam¬ 
boat navigation on the Missouri, others re¬ 
turned at once to St. Louis with loads of fur, 
buffalo robes, tallow, and smoked buffalo 
tongues. St. Louis was the great outfitting 
place for the Indian trade and the fur trade 
of the Far West. 

Mahota decided to wait at least a few 
weeks at Fort Union. If Zach and Allen 
had left the gold diggings in Idaho in early 
summer, they should be at Fort Union not 
much later than the middle of August, but 
thus far no miners had come down from 
Fort Benton. 

As indicated before, the summer of 1864 
was not a happy time at Fort Union. Re¬ 
ports reached the fort that General Sully 
had had a fight with the Sioux at Ivilldeer 
Mountains and in the Bad Lands of the 
Little Missouri. His army was expected to 
reach the fort about the middle of August 
and three of his steamboats were supposed to 
enter the Yellowstone, only a few miles be- 


FORT UNION 


213 


low Fort Union. For General Sully had 
planned to take his troops and boats far up 
the Yellowstone into the heart of the Sioux 
and buffalo country. 

That under these conditions the Sioux 
were not good neighbors was very natural. 
The horses and other stock of the fort had to 
be closely watched day and night, so that 
prowling Sioux warriors would not kill them 
or run them off. 

Both Tubby and Hiram desired very 
much to go hunting, as buffaloes and other 
game came at times within sight of the bas¬ 
tions, but it was only at the risk of his life 
that a man could venture a mile or two out of 
the stockade. 

Mahota occasionally slipped out to visit 
some friendly Sioux, who from time to time 
put up their tepees near the fort, but he was 
even less inclined to go hunting or venture 
any distance from the protection of the fort 
than Tubby and Hiram, for he lived in con¬ 
stant dread of falling in with hunting or 
trading parties of Assiniboins and Gros 
Ventres, who were bitter enemies of the 


214 THE SIOUX RUNNER 

Sioux. Like Tubby and Hiram, he slept in¬ 
side the palisade every night. 

To Tubby there were two redeeming fea¬ 
tures about life at Fort Union. The place 
had plenty of real cream and fresh butter, 
and even fresh vegetables from a garden 
close by. The other feature was that Tubby 
could sleep as long and as often as he wanted 
to. In fact on many a day the lads in the 
afternoon took a nap in a shady corner, in¬ 
side the palisade of course, because there was 
nothing else to do. 

On the 7th of August a party of miners 
from the region of Virginia City in Mon¬ 
tana passing down the Yellowstone paid a 
visit to the fort, and about the middle of 
August General Sully’s troops reached Fort 
Union and three of his boats reached the 
Yellowstone. 

General Sully had originally started five 
boats, but two of them could not come up on 
account of the low water. He saw now that 
Charles Larpenteur had been right, when he 
told him in St. Louis in May that his boats 
would not be able to ascend the Yellowstone. 


FOET UNION 


215 


He concluded that the soldiers had gone this 
season as far as they could go, and with both 
his army and his boats he started down river, 
but he left one company under Captain 
Greer as a garrison at Fort Union. Only 
two boats returned, one, the Island City, 
having been wrecked on the up trip two miles 
below the mouth of the Yellowstone. 

Thus ended the campaign of General 
Sully against the Sioux in the summer of 
1864. The campaign would not have been 
necessary, had President Lincoln and his 
military advisers known the real disposition 
of the Sioux nation as a whole. 

It was fortunate for Fort Union that 
Captain Greer and his soldiers were sta¬ 
tioned at the fort. For on November 20th, 
a crowd of eighty-five miners from Montana 
came to the fort. They had started home 
too late and their boats were frozen in on 
the Yellowstone, about twenty miles from 
Fort Union. Half of them started on foot 
for the States, as the country east was re¬ 
ferred to at Fort Union. 

About forty decided to winter at Fort 


216 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


Union, and Larpenteur says that they would 
have proved very troublesome boarders if 
the soldiers had not maintained order among 
them. 

But we must return to our story. The 
arrival of the soldiers at Fort Union did not 
make Mahota and his white friends feel any 
happier. The place seemed now very much 
crowded to them, especially to Mahota. 
When the last week of August began and no 
Idaho miners had arrived, the three friends 
grew tired of waiting. 

“ My brothers,” Hiram said one evening 
as all three of them sat on the river bank 
watching the turbid current swirl and glide 
toward its junction with the Yellowstone, 
“ this is what white men call a dog’s life, a 
lazy dog’s life, and I am tired of it.” 

“So am I!” Tubby chimed in without 
giving Mahota a chance to express his feel¬ 
ing. “ I am awfully tired of it. The cows 
have gone dry, and the fresh butter is gone. 
I don’t care any more for potatoes, and I 
have made up sleep for a year. Please, let 
us get out of this rathole.” 


FORT UNION 


217 


Calling Fort Union a rathole was not en¬ 
tirely an expression of impatience on the 
part of Tubby. Every Missouri River post 
was infested with rats. There was not al¬ 
ways war with the Indians on the Missouri, 
but the war against the rats at all the forts 
never ceased until a fort was abandoned. 
After the soldiers arrived, bringing with 
them corn and oats for their horses, the rats 
seemed to increase daily. 

“ Honestly, Hiram!” exclaimed Tubby, 
“ I believe the big chief of all the Missouri 
River rats lands a boat-load of them here 
every night. Mahota, I say we leave this 
place before the rats carry us off. Hon¬ 
estly, Hiram, one bit me in the nose last 
night.” 

“ My brothers,” replied Mahota thought¬ 
fully, “ we shall go. But it is three hun¬ 
dred miles to Fort Benton and, if we do not 
cross the Missouri twice, we must go around 
a big bend, and it will be nearly four hundred 
miles. But I am also tired of being here, 
and to-morrow or next day we shall leave.” 


CHAPTER XXVIII 

Gifts of the White Men 

Mahota was as good as his word; and an 
hour after sunset next day, the lads quietly 
slipped out of Fort Union. Only the factor 
and a few of their intimate friends had been 
told of their intended departure and their 
destination. 

Mr. Larpenteur warned them of the great 
risk they took in venturing on the trip with 
so small a party, but he admired their grit 
and remarked: “ Well, lads, dangers and dif¬ 
ficulties grow as freely in this country as 
prickly pears. If I had stopped or pulled 
back every time I heard of danger ahead, I 
should not have lived more than thirty years 
in the Indian country. Don’t be foolhardy. 
Keep your eyes open and your powder dry, 
but don’t shoot unless you have to. A stout 
heart and a cool head generally get through 

all right. It’s the fools that get killed.” 

218 


GIFTS OF THE WHITE MEJST 219 

When the lads told him that they were not 
going to leave until after dark, he approved 
their caution. “ That is a good plan,” he 
agreed as he bid them farewell. “ There 
are always a lot of Indians hanging around 
this place, and they have always plenty of 
time to follow the trail of a small party on 
the chance that they may pick up a good 
horse or even a scalp. Look at my Fort 
Galpin west of the mouth of Milk River. 
We have abandoned it, but you might like to 
camp there a few days, if the Indians have 
not burnt it.” 

Fort Galpin had been erected by Larpen- 
teur in the summer of 1862. The lads knew 
that only about a month ago in July, 1864, 
some Sioux Indians had attacked the fort, 
killed two men, and wounded some of the 
cattle and horses. Soon after this attack the 
fort had been abandoned. 

The story of Fort Galpin is that of many 
small trading-posts. Many of them were 
occupied only a short time, and as the whole 
structure was built of wood, they were 
sooner or later destroyed by fire, and now 


220 THE SIOUX RUNNER 

the location of scores of them and even their 
names are forgotten. 

On the other hand, a few of the larger 
posts like Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas, Fort 
Pierre and Fort Union on the Missouri were 
important centers of trade for a quarter of 
a century or longer, but even of these historic 
posts scarcely enough is left to-day to 
identify the site. 

These so-called forts were trading-posts 
and not forts in the military sense, but 
against Indians they were real forts. The 
larger posts generally had a small cannon on 
the lower floor of each of the blockhouses; 
and a cannon, commanding the entrance, 
was also placed in the courtyard. Such was 
the arrangement at Fort Union. 

Each blockhouse commanded the outside 
of two walls, and a few resolute men supplied 
with arms, ammunition, and provisions could 
hold a fort against almost any number of In¬ 
dians. Bows and arrows were useless 
against such a fort, the firearms of the In¬ 
dians were not much more effective, and In¬ 
dians had no artillery. 


GIFTS OF THE WHITE MEN 221 


Numerous military forts erected in the In¬ 
dian country were built on the same general 
plan, such as Fort Snelling, Fort Sully, 
Fort Buford, and many others; but these 
Government forts were often built of stone, 
when stone was available. The almost uni¬ 
versal building material on the Missouri was 
cottonwood logs, but the blockhouses at Fort 
Union were built of stone. 

The smaller forts were not provided with 
bastions, or blockhouses, as they were more 
generally called. Many so-called forts were 
not even provided with a palisade; the whole 
fort consisted of one or more log houses. 

The lads had sold their two American 
horses for a good price to Captain Greer, 
who was already short of horses for his com¬ 
pany. Mahota and Hiram had agreed that 
it would be better if they used only what is 
now known in the west as grass horses, which 
means horses that are used to hard travel, 
while they are living entirely on the grass 
along the trail, without being fed oats or 
corn. 

“ At Fort Benton,” Hiram had argued, 


222 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


“ if we ever reach the place and find our 
brothers, we shall have to sell all our horses 
for what they will bring, because we shall 
undoubtedly return by boat this fall or by 
steamer next summer. We may even have 
to give the horses away or turn them loose 
and then the Blackfeet Indians would catch 
them.” 

Moreover, the lads had learned that they 
would not need to carry much food, because 
game would be abundant on their route; and 
they had supplied themselves with more 
powder and with small shot for water-fowl 
and prairie chickens. Mahota had also 
secured from a Teton Sioux a short hunting 
bow and a quiver full of arrows. 

“We may want to hunt with bow and 
arrows,” he remarked, “ if we come to a 
place where it would be dangerous to fire a 
gun.” 

The weather was now dry and warm, as is 
generally the case on the upper Missouri at 
this time of the year. Great masses of 
goldenrods, asters, and sunflowers made the 
prairie and the river bottom look like an end- 


GIFTS OF THE WHITE MEN 223 


less wild flower garden, and the lads noticed 
that yellow, white, and purple were almost 
the only colors shown. During the warm 
hours of the day, countless butterflies, wasps, 
beetles, and quick, shiny little wild bees made 
merry on the flowers, but Tubby looked in 
vain for honey-bees, until Mahota told him 
that there were no honey-bees in the Indian 
country. 

“ The white men brought them,” he told 
Tubby, “ from across the big sea. They 
brought many things to the Indians: Guns, 
and knives of steel, and powder and shot. 
They also brought us measles and smallpox 
and whiskey, which is a great curse to our 
people. Our forefathers made knives and 
arrowheads and many other things of stone. 
They had not many sicknesses and no whis¬ 
key. A long time ago the Indians had no 
horses and had to hunt the buffalo on foot. 
But that is a very long time ago, and some of 
our people think they always had horses. 
But my grandfather told me that horses 
came from settlements of the white men in 
Mexico through the country of the Apaches 


224 


THE SIOUX RUXNER 


and other tribes, who live far south of the 
Sioux country. 

“ I think my grandfather told me the 
truth, because he was a wise man who knew 
all the legends and the history of our people. 
He also told me that, when his father was a 
small boy, some of the Sioux lived in a 
country which was all woods. But our 
enemies, the Chippewas, bought guns of the 
white traders, before the traders came to the 
Sioux, and in that way they were able to 
drive the Sioux out of the wooded country 
in Minnesota.” 

There was another thing about the 
prairie west of Fort Union that struck the 
white lads as strange. The grass was no 
longer green, but it looked dead and brown¬ 
ish. It was also very short, except in most 
places in the river bottom, where it was tall 
and still green; but, to the surprise of Tubby 
and Hiram, the horses preferred the short 
dry grass and kept in good condition on it. 

The lads also noticed that the trees did not 
grow as tall on the upper Missouri as on the 
lower river. The river itself was much nar- 


GIFTS OF THE WHITE MEN 225 

rower than below the mouth of the Yellow¬ 
stone. Its crooked channel wound about 
among numerous sandbars and patches of 
small timber, which in many places was re¬ 
duced to mere bushes of cottonwood, box- 
elder, elm, willows, and buffalo-berries, while 
patches of the pale green sagebrush became 
more and more common. 

These bushy flats provided excellent cover 
for deer and elk, but furnished no fuel for 
the steamboats, and the lads had learned at 
Fort Union that a Missouri River steamboat 
used as much as thirty cords of wood in 
twenty-four hours. 

“ Mahota,” suggested Tubby, “ if our 
horses give out, we can stay at Fort Galpin 
and become wood-hawks, like Old Dacotah. 
Then next spring we can easily pay our 
steamboat fare to Fort Benton with cord- 
wood and be money ahead. The fireman on 
the Chippewa told me that a cord of dry 
wood is worth ten dollars above Fort 
Union.” 

To their great joy the lads found that the 
Indians had not burnt Fort Galpin. They 


226 THE SIOUX RUNNER 

reached the abandoned fort on the afternoon 
of the fourth day, having averaged twenty- 
five miles a day since they left Fort Union. 

Tubby gave a shout when they rode into 
the deserted fort. “ Hiram,” he exclaimed, 
“ this is a dandy place! Just think, here we 
have a real fort all to ourselves. Mahota, 
please let us camp here a few days. I want 
to get some ducks and prairie chickens and 
some of the big sage-hens, and this evening 
I am going to set out some lines for catfish. 
I only hope the beastly rats have all left this 
fort.” 



CHAPTER XXIX 

The Abandoned Fort 

“ Oh, Hiram, this is a fine place!” ex¬ 
claimed Tubby, when they took their horses 
over a low stretch of sand to let them have 
a good drink at the river, before they pick¬ 
eted them on a plain of very good grass close 
to the fort. 

“ Let us all go into the water,” Hiram 
suggested. “ This is the best place for it 
we have struck on the whole trip.” 

The water was delightfully warm and not 
so muddy as below the mouth of the Yellow¬ 
stone, and like a wide, shining ribbon, the 
current wound about on a broad bed of sand, 
which indicated the extent of the river at 
high water in early summer. 

Not until the lads had returned from their 
bath did they look carefully around in their 
fort. 

There was a stove, which Hiram at once 

227 


228 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


pronounced to be in good working order. 
There was a table of rough cottonwood 
boards, and there were three plain chairs. 
Tubby also found a few kettles and pans 
stowed away under one of the bunks. The 
building had a good board floor, and the 
roof was in fair condition, as shown by the 
fact that no marks of leakage appeared. 

“ Mahota, I think we did a foolish thing,” 
said Hiram, “ when we came right into the 
fort without first scouting around it care¬ 
fully.” 

“ I did the scouting as we rode along,” re¬ 
plied Mahota. “ I saw that no tracks led to 
the fort or away from it, and so I knew that 
it was safe to enter.” 

Next morning Tubby caught a catfish, 
which, fried in buffalo suet brought from 
Fort Union, made a tasty breakfast for the 
three campers. 

Tubby at once took to the place, as if it 
were going to be his permanent home. Be¬ 
fore noon, he returned to camp with two 
sage-hens. Hiram skinned the birds to get 
rid of the gamy taste, and after he had par- 


THE ABANDONED FORT 


229 


boiled them, so as to draw out some of the 
sage flavor, he baked them in the oven with 
bacon and butter. 

“ I made a feast,” he remarked, as he set 
them on the table, “ to celebrate our taking 
Fort Galpin. But you need not expect 
many feasts of this kind, because the butter 
we brought from Fort Union is not going to 
last long.” 

Mahota and Hiram had not been idle 
while Tubby was out hunting and getting 
acquainted with the immediate neighbor¬ 
hood. They had first carefully scouted 
about a mile up and down the river for signs 
of Indians. 

“ If Indians have been here within the last 
two weeks,” Mahota told his friends, “ we 
shall find pony tracks leading to the river, 
across the sand and dry mud.” 

They found many tracks of deer, elk, and 
buffalo, but a most careful search revealed 
no tracks of horses. 

When they felt sure that no Indians had 
recently been near their fort, they turned 
their attention to other important matters. 


230 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


“ I wish there were a well inside the stock¬ 
ade/’ said Hiram. “ Going two hundred 
yards to the river for every drop of water is 
a lot of work, and might get us into serious 
trouble/’ 

“ We do not have to go all the way to the 
river for our own water/’ Mahota suggested, 
“ but our horses will have to drink at the 
river. We must go arid bring the old shovel, 
which the traders left, when they took away 
the good tools of the place. 

“ Dig here,” he told Hiram when they 
had returned with the shovel and had reached 
the sand left by the high water of spring. 

Very soon the sand thrown out showed 
moisture; a little deeper it was decidedly 
wet; and when Hiram had dug down about 
five feet, a good body of water, much cooler 
than that in the river, began to fill the bottom 
of the hole. 

Hiram set out an early supper; and when 
dishes and pans were washed and each hung 
up in its place, he swept the floor with a 
broom made by tying a bundle of willow 
twigs to a stick. 


THE ABANDONED FORT 


231 


“ Now, friends,” he remarked, “ we have 
made this place look almost like a real home.” 

Tubby agreed with his brother, and wished 
that they might stay many days in this home¬ 
like camp. He was glad to be away from 
the crowding and other discomforts of Fort 
Union, and he could not think with pleasure 
of the long trip ahead. At this place he 
could stalk game and birds, could fish and 
bathe in the river, things dear to the heart of 
every boy. But when they were travelling 
day after day, he could never stop to look at 
bird or beast or anything else that interested 
him; it was just going, going all the time, 
watching for signs of danger, making camp 
and breaking camp. 

After each lad had made up his bed in 
his own bunk, they took the horses to water 
at the river, the main channel of which now 
was only about a hundred yards wide; and 
they tied the animals inside the stockade for 
the night. 

Then they sat down in front of the gate 
and watched a mass of flecked clouds turn 
from gold to pink and red; and with the 


232 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


changing colors of the slowly drifting clouds, 
the long winding thread of the river changed 
colors. 

And then the stars began to twinkle, and 
the moon rose big and red, as if it came out 
of the river and patches of timber toward 
Fort Union. Wolves and coyotes began to 
utter their weird nocturnal calls, and a pair 
of night-hawks, gliding back and forth over 
the fort, greeted the lads with their sharp, 
“ Paint, paint,” and the rush of wings pecu¬ 
liar to these otherwise silent birds of the dusk 
and moonlight nights. 

The lads arose, fastened the gate with a 
piece of rusty chain, and rolled up in their 
blankets; not indeed without some appre¬ 
hension. Tubby, especially, feared that 
with the darkness the rats would come out of 
their hiding-places, and certain annoying 
and much-hated insects out of their cracks 
and crevices. But, to his great joy, not a 
rat appeared and no insect disturbed his 
sound sleep. 


CHAPTER XXX 
An Indian Invention 

During the next few days Hiram and 
Mahota seemed to be considering some im¬ 
portant matter, and they let Tubby roam 
about at will. He was not, however, to fire 
at any big game, nor go farther than about a 
mile from the fort. He was not to cross the 
river, although the lads had discovered a 
ford about a mile above the fort. He was 
told that he might bring in a few more sage- 
hens, but otherwise he was not to do any 
shooting. 

Tubby made good use of his permission to 
roam as he pleased. He tried to crawl up 
on a prairie-dog hole and catch the funny 
little dog that isn’t a dog. He plunged into 
a marsh trying to catch some young ducks, 
but every one of them eluded him by hiding 
quietly in tall grass, while the mother made 

a great commotion with flapping and quack- 

233 


234 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


ing within a few yards of the wildly excited 
boy. He came to camp with three young 
sage-hens, and told an exciting story about 
stalking some black-tail deer. 

“ There was a whole bunch of them, five 
or six,” he said. “ I didn’t have time to 
count them. I came on them in a draw, half 
a mile down the valley. I thought they 
would break for a patch of large timber near 
the river, but they didn’t. Honestly, 
Hiram, they went straight up the hill faster 
than I have ever seen any white-tail race over 
level ground. They ran as if they had 
springs in their legs, and the steeper the hill 
grew, the faster they ran; they just went 
bounding straight up, then they turned east, 
and I lost sight of them as they passed over 
a ridge into another ravine.” 

“ The black-tail are runners-up-the-hills,” 
Mahota confirmed Tubby’s report. “ When 
they flee from the hunter or his dogs, they 
always turn to the hills, and in the hills no 
dog and no wolf can catch them.” 

Next morning, when the lads were taking 
the horses to the river, Hiram and Mahota 


AN INDIAN INVENTION 235 

told Tubby that they had some news for 
him. 

“ We are not going to Fort Benton,” 
Hiram told him. “We are going to wait 
for Zach and Allen right here, and sort of 
waylay or ambush them.” 

Tubby did not listen to hear any more. 
He dropped the picket-rope, threw his hat 
in the air, turned a somersault and then 
danced around as if he had stepped on a 
bumblebee’s nest. 

“ Hurrah for you! ” he shouted, “ hurrah 
for you! ” when he had calmed down enough 
to speak. “ I never did want to go there. 
It is too far off, clear at the end of the world. 
And I bet it is a beastly hole, with more 
rats and bugs than Fort Union.” 

“ The big brother and I have had much 
talk about your brothers,” Mahota began to 
explain, “ and we have it in our hearts that 
this Fort Galpin is the best place to find your 
brothers.” 

“ Why could we not look for them in the 
mountains? ” asked Tubby. “ I should not 
like to watch for them at Fort Benton, but 


236 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


I should like to go with you and look for 
them in the gold mountains.” 

“ The Shining Mountains, where white 
men dig for gold, are very big,” replied 
Mahota, “ and they are a bad country for 
travelling. We could never find your 
brothers there. But there is another reason 
why I cannot take you to the gold mines. 
They are in the country of the Blackfeet, or 
near their country, and if a Blackfeet war 
party found us they would kill us all.” 

“You told us once that the Blackfeet did 
sometimes come to this country,” Tubby 
argued. 

“ Little big brother, I told you the truth,” 
Mahota replied. “ But we have now a white 
man’s fort, of which all Indians are afraid, 
if the men in the fort know how to defend 
themselves and are not cowards. Now I 
have told you the reasons why we cannot look 
for your brothers in the mountains.” 

“ But, Mahota, how are we going to find 
them here? We cannot watch the river day 
and night,” Tubby replied. 

“ We are not going to sit on the river day 


AN INDIAN INVENTION 


237i 


and night,” Mahota answered; “ we are go¬ 
ing to make them stop when they come by. 

“You and Hiram must come with me 
now, and we shall set out the words that will 
make them stop,” Mahota continued. 

Tubby did not know what Mahota meant 
by “ setting out words,” but he followed 
Mahota and Hiram to the ford a mile above 
Fort Galpin, where all three crossed to the 
south side of the Missouri. Here Mahota 
cut a stout pole which he fixed firmly in the 
sand, after he had split the upper end. 

“ Now, brother,” he said to Hiram, “ write 
on your paper the words which will tell your 
brothers that we are at Fort Galpin, and put 
the paper in the split of the stick.” 

Hiram questioned if men coming down 
the river would see the paper and stop to 
read it. 

“ All men in the Indian country,” Mahota 
replied, “ go to a letter put up in a stick and 
read it. And if Indians, who cannot read, 
find a letter in a stick, they take it to a 
trader or to somebody who can tell them 
what the letter says. 


238 


THE SIOUX BUHNER 


“ You see, my brothers, that men coming 
down the river in a boat are headed for this 
pole for half a mile. And now I shall tie a 
white rag on the pole, so men will see it also 
at night, when it is not too dark to travel, 
but when they might not see the paper on the 
pole.” 

Two similar poles with a message and a 
white rag Mahota placed on the north side 
of the Missouri, one at a bend, just before 
the fort came in sight, and another half a 
mile above the fort. 

“ Now, my friends, we have done all we 
can to make your brothers stop, but we must 
do one more thing at our fort to make it as 
safe as we can make it. A war party of 
Sioux or Blackfeet may pass by here and 
learn that we are in the fort. I do not think 
they can fight us out, but they may try to 
burn us out. 

“ Now, little brother, bring our shovel and 
our broom. I shall set fire to the dead grass, 
and you and the big brother take the broom 
and the shovel and see that the flames do not 
burn our stockade and that they do not run 




























































AN INDIAN INVENTION 


239 


away from us and make a prairie fire, which 
would make a big black country all around 
our fort and leave no grass for our horses, 
besides driving away the deer and the sage- 
hens and all other birds and animals.” 

Then the lads burnt over a strip of fifty 
yards all around their fort, and whenever the 
fire threatened to run away or approach too 
closely to the stockade, Hiram and Tubby 
beat it out with broom and shovel. 

“ This way of making a camp safe against 
fire,” remarked Mahota, “ my father did not 
teach me. I learned it from the white sol¬ 
diers. And now I know of nothing more 
that we can do to make our camp safe and 
to make your brothers stop when they come 
down the river.” 


CHAPTER XXXI 

Unexpected Visitors 

For a month, all three of the lads enjoyed 
their homelike camp and the free life on the 
plains to the utmost. The weather was 
ideal. Warm, clear days were followed by 
cool and sometimes frosty nights, but there 
was plenty of dry wood close to the fort; and 
when the three lads sat around the old rusty 
stove, and Mahota told of his Indian boy¬ 
hood and of many good and bad Indians, 
Tubby almost wished he had been born an 
Indian. But when he expressed this wish to 
his red friend, a sad smile passed over 
Mahota’s face, and more slowly than he 
spoke usually, he replied, “ Little big 
brother, you should thank the Good Lord 
that you were born a white boy.” 

One story, how the young Sioux, Waneta, 
and his fool soldiers, as they were called by 

the Indians, rescued from captivity in spite 

240 


UNEXPECTED VISITORS 241 


of great danger to themselves and much 
hardship several white prisoners, Tubby 
asked Mahota to repeat several times . 1 

In this way, the lads lived with as much 
joy and happiness in their fort on the Mis¬ 
souri as ever can come to boys and young 
men who are in perfect health, have learned 
to take care of themselves, and have become 
hardened to work and indifferent to the 
numerous discomforts and hardships of the 
frontier. 

There was always plenty of work. They 
had to hunt and fish for their daily food; 
there was wood to be cut; and the white 
boys, with great labor, cut a quantity of hay, 
carried it to the stockade on horseback and 
stacked it in a corner. This haymaking of 
his friends Mahota considered one of the 
useless activities of white men. 

“ If we have to stay here during the win¬ 
ter,” he said, “ the ponies can go down to 
the river and eat cottonwood bark,” and 
while his friends were cutting or bringing in 

1 The story may be found in detail in Volume II, 
South Dakota Historical Society Collection. 


242 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


hay he would sit in the shade or go off hunt¬ 
ing or scouting. 

There was, besides the need for much 
camp work, the ever-present element of 
danger, which added zest to the life of the 
three lads at Fort Galpin. Every day they 
were on the lookout for signs of Indians, be¬ 
cause straggling war parties of reckless 
young men of the Sioux, Blackfeet, Assini- 
boins might appear near the fort at any 
time; but they did not see a sign of Indians 
all through the month of September and the 
first half of October, the time during which 
they most expected these unwelcome visitors. 

To one not acquainted with the distribu¬ 
tion of the Indian population, this statement 
may sound improbable, but it must be re¬ 
membered that the Sioux tribes, for instance, 
numbering somewhere between 15,000 and 
20,000 people roamed over a region which 
now constitutes North and South Dakota 
and about half of Wyoming and Montana; 
while other tribes roamed over areas of simi¬ 
lar size. It was not uncommon in those 
days for one or more white trappers to 


UNEXPECTED VISITORS 


243 


live and trap fur a year or more in some 
favorite spot, without having their presence 
discovered by the Indians. 

The late Major Powell, who was person¬ 
ally acquainted with many Indian tribes, es¬ 
timated that the total number of Indians 
ever inhabiting the present area of the 
United States, exclusive of Alaska, was 
somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000, 
and that it was probably nearer to the quar¬ 
ter-million than to the half-million. 

About the twentieth of October, three 
white miners on their way from Idaho to the 
“ States ” picked up Hiram’s letter near the 
ford and spent a night with the lads at Fort 
Galpin. They had not found enough gold 
to pay the expenses of the long trip and de¬ 
clared that they had had enough of digging 
for gold in the mountains. They were go¬ 
ing home and dig for it in the cornfields of 
Kansas. These words aroused the interest 
of Mahota. 

“ The Indians think,” he remarked, “ it is 
strange that white men travel many hundred 
miles to dig gold in the mountains and then 


244 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


go back and buy a cornfield. Why do they 
not stay at home and plow gold out of the 
cornfield without first going to the moun¬ 
tains? ” 

Two items of information which the visi¬ 
tors brought to the lads caused the occu¬ 
pants of Fort Galpin a great deal of worry. 
Most of the miners did not return to the 
“ States ” on the Missouri River, but by way 
of the Yellowstone. To avoid missing their 
brothers, Hiram sent with the three men a 
letter to Charles Larpenteur, asking him to 
request Zach and Allen to wait at Fort 
Union, where they would undoubtedly call 
if they came down the Yellowstone, and in 
that case to send at once a runner to Fort 
Galpin. 

The other item caused even more worry to 
the lads. A most horrible series of robberies 
and murders had been committed in and near 
the mining district by an organized gang of 
cut-throats, whose leader had been one 
Henry Plummer. A number of fearless 
law-abiding citizens had organized them¬ 
selves into a body of vigilantes. They had 


UNEXPECTED VISITORS 245 

tried in open court a number of the criminals 
and hanged those found guilty, including the 
leader, Henry Plummer. The action of the 
vigilantes had become absolutely necessary 
for the protection of decent citizens, because 
there was as yet no strong and regularly or¬ 
ganized government in the mining districts. 
Law and order had now been restored, the 
criminals who had not been captured and 
hanged had fled from the country, but no 
one knew how many men they had robbed 
and murdered. 

A full account of these stirring times may 
be found in “ Vigilante Days and Ways,” 
by N. P. Langford, the father of the Yel¬ 
lowstone National Park. 

The gold mines referred to in this story 
were placer mines, in which the free gold, in 
the shape of nuggets and fine grains, known 
as gold-dust, is washed out of gravel and 
sand. The gold-fields of those days lie 
within the present States of Montana and 
Idaho. 

The lads at Fort Galpin urged the miners 
to spend a week with them, for they had been 


246 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


by themselves long enough heartily to enjoy 
the company of real gentlemen, who, like the 
lads themselves, had had much interesting 
experience. Fort Galpin was by this time 
well stocked with dried and smoked venison 
and smoked wild ducks and geese; and game 
of all kinds, except buffaloes, was abundant 
near the fort. The miners desired as sin¬ 
cerely to accept the hospitality of Fort Gal¬ 
pin as the lads had offered it, but they were 
anxious to continue their journey. Kansas 
City was over a thousand miles away, they 
said, and they could not run a chance of be¬ 
ing frozen in, for they had neither food nor 
clothing and blankets to spend a winter on 
the Missouri. 

Hiram gave them enough smoked and 
fresh meat to last them a week. “ Lads, 
your fort is the biggest strike we have made 
on our whole trip,” the leader told the boys 
when the miners were ready to leave. “ We 
can’t thank you enough for your hospitality. 
On our whole trip from Fort Benton to your 
fort, we have eaten little else but bannocks 
and salt pork, and I assure you lads the only 


UNEXPECTED VISITORS 247 

thing fancy about that salt pork is the price 
we had to pay for it at Fort Benton.” 

The lads stood on the sandbar and saw 
their visitors glide swiftly down the current. 
Two men rowed the heavy boat, while the 
leader sat in the stern and used a paddle for 
steering. Before the boat disappeared 
around the bend, the three men swung their 
hats and called: “ Good-bye, lads, good-bye! 
Much good luck to you! ” 

The lads walked back in silence to their 
fort. For the first time, since they had oc¬ 
cupied Fort Galpin, they felt lonely, and the 
heart of each one was filled with anxiety. 


CHAPTER XXXII 

Anxious Days 

For a few days after the three miners had 
left Fort Galpin the lads almost constantly 
watched the river with both hope and 
anxiety. 

The possibility of an attack by roving war 
parties they felt had become rather remote. 
Mahota told his white friends that the In¬ 
dians were now on their fall hunt, and that 
they would soon move into their winter 
camps. 

No buffaloes had crossed the Missouri 
near Fort Galpin on their migration south¬ 
ward, and for that reason it was not likely 
that any Indians would appear in that vicin¬ 
ity. 

If anxiety about the fate of their brothers 

had not been constantly on their minds, 

Hiram and Tubby could not have imagined 

a more happy existence. The weather con- 

248 


ANXIOUS DAYS 


249 


tinued to be ideal; but signs of approaching 
winter became more and more pronounced. 
Only a few scattered leaves remained on the 
willows and cottonwood-trees. Small quiet 
pools were frequently covered with a thin 
coating of ice in the morning, but summer 
seemed to return to the plains daily. The 
sun shone from a cloudless sky, a blue haze 
hung on the horizon, and from bushes and 
dead weeds and flowers in the river bottom 
long white streamers of gossamer floated in 
the warm gentle breeze of Indian summer. 

But soon after the first of November came 
nature’s most emphatic warning that sum¬ 
mer was past. The sky turned cloudy, a 
chilling northwester, driving a cloud of dust 
before it, moaned at the corners of the build¬ 
ing and rattled some loose boards on the 
roof. With the driving wind, the first 
snow-flurry of the season passed over Fort 
Galpin. 

That evening the lads sat around the stove 
for nearly an hour without a word being 
spoken. At last Hiram broke the silence. 

“ Mahota,” he said, “ our brothers must 


250 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


arrive very soon, or we shall not get out of 
this country before winter sets in.” 

“Yes, my brother, they must come very 
soon,” Mahota replied, and again each lad 
sat in silence with his own thoughts. 

Perhaps Zach and Allen were among the 
unidentified victims of Plummer and his 
gang. Perhaps they had met death in the 
mountains in some other form. Both 
Hiram and Tubby realized that some un¬ 
foreseen occurrence had kept them in the 
mountains much longer than they had ex¬ 
pected to stay. It was not likely that they 
had returned undiscovered either by way of 
the Yellowstone or the Missouri. But why, 
if they were still alive, they should remain in 
the mountains almost two years longer than 
they had planned, and why they should delay 
their departure until so late in the season, 
was a mystery to the lads at Fort Galpin. 

The morning after the snow-flurry the 
sun was shining again, but the wind had still 
a wintry feeling. Tubby walked up the 
river to the ford to take a look at the letter 
which had been put there in place of the one 


ANXIOUS DAYS 


251 


taken up by the three miners. He had done 
this every morning since the departure of the 
miners, and sometimes he had sat on the bank 
and watched for an hour the point where the 
view of the stream westward was cut off by 
the next bend. Tubby had been much at¬ 
tached to both of his older brothers, es¬ 
pecially to Allen, and since he had heard of 
the crimes of the band led by Plummer, he 
suffered even more from anxiety about their 
fate than Hiram, who felt that the two men 
would not needlessly expose themselves to 
danger and would not be easily caught in a 
trap or surprised by bandits. 

The long trip through the wild country 
had wrought a great change in Tubby. He 
was no longer the impulsive, irresponsible 
youngster that started west with the Kansas 
emigrants. He had developed a keen sense 
of direction, and was no longer in danger of 
getting lost. He had taught himself to 
swim and be at home in the water with an 
enthusiasm of which only a boy is capable. 
He had never heard of crawl stroke or breast 
stroke or any other stroke, but he could 


252 THE SIOUX RUXXER 

swim. He could swim on his back and on 
his side, on the surface and under water, and 
he delighted in breasting the current and div¬ 
ing to the bottom after stones he had 
dropped in. Even now, although the water 
had become quite cold, he enjoyed a dive and 
short swim, whenever the day was warm and 
pleasant. Hiram and Mahota shivered 
when they watched Tubby plunge and dive 
like a seal, but Tubby only laughed at them 
as he sprang out of the stream, rubbed him¬ 
self down with a gunny-sack, raced up and 
down the sandbar for a few minutes, and 
jumped into his clothes. 

“ The little big brother would make a 
great runner if he were a Sioux,” remarked 
Mahota, when he had seen Tubby’s perform¬ 
ance the first time. 

But his anxiety about the fate of his two 
older brothers Tubby could not overcome. 
He had discovered an old lantern under one 
of the bunks, and every evening, before the 
lads went to bed, he hung out the lantern 
with a lighted candle at the point where the 
river curved closest to the fort, and to the 


ANXIOUS DAYS 253 

lantern-post he had tied a note addressed to 
Zach and Allen Sterling. 

Mahota and Hiram tried to convince 
Tubby that he was just wasting their whole 
supply of candles. 

“ l r our brothers will not travel on a dark 
night,” Mahota told him. “ They know that 
the river is very crooked, and they will be 
afraid of sticking on a sandbar and of break¬ 
ing a hole in their boat on a snag.” 

“ They can shove her off the sandbar if 
they get stuck,” Tubby replied. 44 And I 
know that they will travel carefully in a 
strong boat and will not be much afraid of 
snags. If I burn up all our candles, we can 
make new candles, because we have plenty 
of deer and elk suet, and we can make wicks 
out of the threads of a gunny-sack. Zach 
and Allen might travel on a dark night and 
then, unless I hang out the lantern, they 
would not see any of our letters. They 
would pass Fort Galpin, and they might not 
take the time to stop at Fort Union. I shall 
hang out the lantern until the river freezes 


over. 


254 


THE SIOUX BUNKER 


As the days passed by, Tubby grew more 
and more anxious and restless. Every 
morning he took his gun and walked up the 
river for a mile or two. Quite often he re¬ 
turned with a load of venison, which Mahota 
smoked and dried over a slow fire, for the 
lads had long reckoned with the possibility of 
being compelled to winter at Fort Galpin. 
While Tubby was away on his daily trips up 
the river, Hiram and Mahota cut wood and 
did other work preparing their quarters for 
winter. 

“ Hiram, I am afraid Zach and Allen did 
not start in time,” Tubby said one evening 
as he returned from his daily trip. “ In sev¬ 
eral quiet and shallow bends of the river, the 
ice never melted to-day, but to-night it will 
not grow thicker because the weather has 
turned warm and cloudy. Perhaps Zach 
and Allen went east overland, or Plummer’s 
men got them after all.” 

But although Tubby began to feel dis¬ 
couraged, he nevertheless faithfully hung 
out the lantern every night. 

St) much had Tubby been worrying about 


ANXIOUS DAYS 


255 


the fate of his two brothers that he had even 
become a light sleeper. On several nights 
he had been awakened by the snorting and 
stamping of the horses, and he had gotten up 
to peer through the loopholes of the palisade 
for prowling Indians, because Mahota had 
told him that horses often gave warning of 
the approach of an enemy. 

On the night after he had come to camp 
quite discouraged, he again woke up, feeling 
that he had heard some noise outside the wall 
against which his bunk was placed. He 
slipped quietly out of his blankets, listened at 
one of the loopholes, and peered out into the 
darkness. His heart began to beat fast. Was 
he mistaken? Or were there really men 
walking outside? No, there were really 
footsteps outside, footsteps of Indian moc¬ 
casins on the short soft grass that had come 
up after a rain where the lads had burnt the 
prairie. A moment later Tubby's heart al¬ 
most stopped beating, for in plain view not 
more than a rod away from him stood two 
men. It was too dark for Tubby to see their 
features, but he did make out that they wore 


256 THE SIOUX RUXNER 

no hats and that each carried a gun on his 
shoulder. 

Tubby looked and listened a few minutes 
longer, but as the men approached to listen 
for sounds inside the fort, he backed away 
from the loophole, and as noiselessly as a 
shadow, he slipped back into the building 
and over to his brother’s bunk. 

“Hiram, wake up, wake up!” he whis¬ 
pered under his breath. “ There are two 
men outside. I think they are Indians. 
They walk like Indians with moccasins on, 
and each has a gun. They haven’t,—they 
haven’t any hats on. And I think, Hiram, 
—I,—I think they have long hair like In¬ 
dians, but a beard like white men.” 

By this time Mahota was awake, too, and 
all three took their guns and slipped out into 
the courtyard. But they could hear no foot¬ 
steps and no human voices. 

Each one looked and listened at a different 
loophole. After a little Mahota came over 
to Hiram and Tubby. “ My brothers,” he 
whispered, “ they are white men. I heard 
them whisper words in English, and I can 


ANXIOUS DAYS 


257 


tell from their walk that they are white men. 
Look, now they are reading your letter at 
the lantern.” 

Hiram silently opened the gate and called, 
“ Who are you, men? Come up here, if you 
are all right.” 

The moment Hiram spoke the lantern 
went out, but Tubby could no longer hold 
himself and cried out, “ Zach and Allen, is 
it you? ” 

“ Heavens Almighty!” the answer came 
back. “ That’s my youngest brother’s voice! 
Tubby, how did you ever get into this place? 
We thought this letter was some kind of 
devilish plot! ” 


CHAPTER XXXIII 

A Desperate Race 

There was no more sleep at Fort Galpin 
that night. Zach and Allen had travelled 
on a dark night for a very special reason. 
Two days’ journey out of Fort Benton two 
strangers had overtaken them. The stran¬ 
gers had a faster boat than Zach and Allen, 
but still they stayed with the Kansas men, 
who became suspicious of their looks and 
actions and decided to “ shake ” them, as 
Allen put it, at the first opportunity. On 
the previous afternoon the strangers had 
been compelled to stop to repair a leak in 
their boat. The Kansas men went ahead 
leisurely as long as they were in sight of the 
strangers, but as soon as they had rounded 
the next bend, they rowed at their best speed 
and kept going until after dark, when they 
landed to eat a few cold pancakes and a bit 
of cold bacon. 


258 


A DESPEEATE EACE 


259 


After a short rest, they decided to travel 
all night as fast as the darkness would per¬ 
mit. When about midnight, they saw 
Tubby’s lantern and read his message, their 
suspicion was again aroused. They had 
with much difficulty escaped being robbed in 
the gold-fields and on their way out, and 
they were determined not to fall into a trap 
of any river-pirates, and neither of them 
knew Tubby’s handwriting. 

They had wintered in the mountains the 
last season, because their first find of gold 
had proved to be nothing more than an 
isolated pocket. 

About the middle of August they had been 
thoroughly discouraged and had decided to 
leave for home, but on digging down five or 
six feet more in the bed of the small stream 
on their claim, they had struck real pay 
dirt. 

“ There, boys, that’s our story,” Allen 
concluded. “We put in three years of the 
hardest kind of work, and we brought out 
enough dust to buy a farm for all four of 
the Sterling boys, but we would not go 


260 


THE SIOUX RUXNER 


through it again for seven farms. In fact I 
am not sure,” he added, laughing, “ but that 
we should be just as well off if we had 
stayed in Kansas and worked as hard as we 
did in the mountains.” 

After a night’s rest, Zach and Allen left 
for Fort Union in their boat, while Mahota 
and the two younger lads travelled to the 
same place on horseback. 

At Fort Union they sold all their horses 
to Captain Greer, loaded their boat with the 
best of the smoked and dried meat from Fort 
Galpin, added a few things bought at Fort 
Union, and all five started down the Mis¬ 
souri in Zach and Allen’s boat. 

Two men worked constantly at the oars, 
while a third man steered. In this way they 
made the best possible time. They were not 
molested by any Indians, and the two men, 
whom Zach and Allen had left behind west 
of Fort Galpin, they never saw again. 

But there was one serious danger still 
threatening them, and threatening them 
every minute. They were running a race 
with winter; for it was now past the middle 


A DESPERATE RACE 261 

of November, and any morning they might 
find the river frozen over solid. 

One evening, about the twentieth of the 
month, they camped at the mouth of a small 
stream south of a large stand of cotton¬ 
woods, long known to the Indians as the 
Painted Woods. That night there came a 
sudden drop in the temperature. At day¬ 
light, Allen walked down to a quiet stretch 
in the river. When he returned to camp he 
said briefly, “We have lost the race. The 
river is frozen over. After breakfast we 
start building our winter camp. There are 
five of us, well armed, and I reckon we can 
hold our own.” 

Building a camp which would be comfort¬ 
able in a Dakota winter would be a difficult 
undertaking for novices, but these five were 
experienced campers, and Zach and Allen 
had brought axes, picks, shovels, and a large 
cross-cut saw for just such an emergency. 

At the end of a week, the five had built a 
comfortable cabin of cottonwood logs. It 
was provided with a roughly built fireplace, 
for which mud had served as mortar. There 


262 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


were three bunks, and room enough left for 
the men to sit down and move about. Table, 
benches, and stools the two miners likewise 
made of cottonwood logs, split and hewn 
into proper shape. 

Hiram and Tubby were afraid that the 
roof of poles covered with dirt would leak 
in the spring, but Mahota reassured them 
saying, “We shall cover the mud with 
rushes; then it will not thaw out before the 
river has opened in the spring.” 

They lived on the meat they had brought 
with them, and on deer and elk, which they 
hunted within a mile or less of their camp, 
and they also had several sacks of flour 
brought from Fort Union. 

If any hostile Indians learned of the pres¬ 
ence of the camp, they thought it best to 
leave five well-armed men alone; but friendly 
Mandan hunters paid several visits to the 
white men’s camp; however, as a matter of 
precaution, neither Mahota nor any one of 
the white men ever went out hunting alone. 

Hiram as well as Tubby was often curious 
about one question, on which Zach and Allen 


A DESPERATE RACE 


263 


never gave any information. The two 
miners carried only a very small quantity of 
gold-dust in their leather belts. Where was 
the rest of it? There was no bag nor bottle 
in camp which by its weight betrayed that it 
contained any gold-dust. 

Once Tubby asked outright: “ Allen, 
where do you keep the big lot of gold-dust 
you found? ” 

“ Never mind, brother,” Allen replied. 
“ It is in a perfectly safe place. When we 
get to Kansas City you will find out where 
we kept it.” 

The winter did not seem at all long. The 
two miners had an endless number of stories 
and adventures to relate, and Mahota and 
the two younger lads were able to contribute 
their share of stories on the long winter even¬ 
ings. 

For three months, the cold and generally 
clear days continued, relieved only by roar¬ 
ing blizzards, lasting two or three days. At 
such times the five campers slept as much as 
possible, ate two meals a day, fed the fire, 
and told stories;" When the blinding storm 


264 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


was at its worst, it was not safe to go farther 
than a few yards from the cabin. 

But during the last week of March, the 
air seemed to change, and in places sheltered 
from the wind the snow began to melt a 
little. 

During all this time the boat, tied by a 
stout rope to a cottonwood-tree, lay buried 
in snow. 

At the close of the first week in April, 
Mahota came to the cabin with great news. 
“ The crows have come back,” he reported, 
“ and all the Sioux people know that their 
return is a sure sign of spring.” 

But for more than a week, the great river 
showed no sign of life. A shallow stream of 
dirty snow water ran on the ice, but the ice 
itself, three feet thick, showed no sign of 
breaking up. 

One day, toward evening, the third week 
of April, Mahota and Tubby went up the 
river a mile to hunt. Following a deer some 
distance up a partly wooded bluff, they saw 
a sight, which at first made them doubt the 
evidence of their own eyes. The whole val- 


A DESPERATE RACE 


265 


ley, beginning half a mile farther up, was a 
vast sea of water and blocks of ice, and this 
mass of water and ice was held in place by a 
long, winding wall of great blocks of ice at 
its southern end. 

Mahota looked at the scene barely a min¬ 
ute before he broke for camp on a dead run. 

“ The ice! ” he called. “ Run, Tubby! ” 
Tubby ran, but he could not keep up with 
Mahota, whose feet seemed scarcely to touch 
the ground. 

“ The ice! The ice! ” Mahota called, as 
he reached the cabin. “ Run, pull boat up! 
Ice-jam! Ice-jam! All coming down! ” 

At first the two miners stood and gazed at 
Mahota as if the young Sioux had suddenly 
gone crazy, but when he pointed up-stream 
and exclaimed again, “ The ice-jam! 
Listen! It is breaking! All coming 
down! ” they ran to their boat, to drag it up 
to higher land. 

But the heavy craft, frozen to the ground, 
would not move. Allen ran for a crowbar; 
but before he could return, there came a 
noise as of a great cyclone or an earthquake. 


266 


THE SIOUX RUNNER 


Big trees snapped as if they were bean-poles 
at the mere touch of the great swirling, 
crushing and grinding blocks of ice. Block 
after block shoved up on a mass of drifted 
trees, just above the boat, which was sub¬ 
merged deep under a gurgling, rushing 
flood. 

It grew dark early, with an inky black¬ 
ness, and the first heavy spring rain beat on 
the cabin. 

It was the gloomiest night any of the five 
had ever spent. Hiram lit a fire, but even 
the crackling red logs could bring no cheer 
after this misfortune. None of the five 
touched a bite of food. 

“ It is all over, all over,” muttered Allen. 
“ God never blessed a gold-digger. It’s a 
cursed business! ” 

By this time Mahota and the two younger 
Sterling boys knew that Zach and Allen had, 
in some way, concealed their gold-dust in the 
boat, and that the fruit of three years of 
work and all their hopes and plans had been 
swept away and buried by the mad Missouri. 

Next morning, the sun shone on a scene 

* ' 


A DESPERATE RACE 


267 


of destruction. Where the fine cottonwoods 
had cast their shadow twenty-four hours ago, 
there ran a big muddy river. But when the 
five campers had eaten their breakfast, they 
shook off the demon of despair, for youth 
and true manhood are unconquerable. 

“ Let us go and look for our boat,” said 
Allen quietly. “ I know it is gone and 
buried, but let us look for it.” 

Some hundred yards down the newly made 
river bank, Mahota pointed to an uprooted 
tree lodged in a quiet bend of the new river 
bed. “ There is your tree,” he called, “ but 
I do not see your boat.” 

Before the two miners realized what was 
going on, Tubby had stripped, splashed some 
water over himself, plunged in, and dived 
down along the tree. 

In a second he shot up again and jumped 
on land. “ I touched the rope! ” he called. 
“ I shall have to dive again. The water is 
horribly cold.” 

After running a few minutes he dived a 
second time, taking careful aim at a certain 
spot. He came up again at once, picked up 


268 


THE SIOUX RUNXER 


his clothes and started on a run for the cabin, 
shouting with chattering teeth, “ She’s— 
there! She is there, I touched her! ” 

Two bearded, rough-looking miners felt a 
choking sensation in their throats in spite of 
naked Tubby’s funny antics. 

“ I was wrong,” Allen confessed. “ God 
has blessed all honest work, whether it be 
done in a gold-field or a corn-field.” 

The river fell rapidly, and two days later, 
the five pulled their boat upon dry land, and 
the next day they started for home. 

A swift current carried them rapidly 
southward, and the high water enabled them 
to shorten many of the long bends. They 
made their last feast, when they reached the 
fort of their friend, Old Dacotah, whom 
they paid liberally for the goods he had ad¬ 
vanced them. 

The birds were singing on a bright May 
day, when five bronzed men carefully pulled 
a number of small bags out of the plugged 
hollow ribs and the double-walled bow and 
stern of a heavy boat. The very heavy bags 
they carried directly to a Kansas City bank. 


A DESPERATE RACE 


269 


The long journey of four white men and 
a lithe Sioux runner had ended. 

There was enough gold to buy four farms 
for that number of white men, and there was 
plenty left to buy a herd of white men’s 
cattle for Mahota. 

The days of the red hunter and the buffalo 
were passing; and a new era was breaking 
over the land of the Sioux, when white men 
and red men, although only after much more 
bitter warfare, would learn that work bears 
more joy than idleness, and that peace brings 
greater blessings than war. 


THE END 















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